Troy Denning - The Obsidian Oracle

Although he was relieved, the king stopped short of crying out in celebration. He had grown familiar enough with this strange place to realize that just because he had no sensation of falling did not mean he had stopped moving. He opened his fingers and thought of the extra dagger he had placed in the satchel. A beautiful bone dirk, intricately carved with the figure of a two-headed serpent, appeared in his palm. Tithian released the weapon, allowing it to drift away from his hand.

The dagger sailed away as though he had thrown it.

For a moment, Tithian could not quite believe what he saw. His senses told him that he was stationary, and his logic told him that after sealing the Oracle’s energy within his cloak, it should behave as did everything else in this strange place. Things weren’t happening at all as he had expected.

The king pressed his palms to his temples and closed his eyes. Fighting back the wave of panic rising in his chest, Tithian tried to think of where he had gone wrong, to identify the crucial detail that would help him understand what was happening to the Oracle.

The only thing that came to him was a growing awareness of his own frustration.

Tithian switched his thoughts to his satchel. He knew even less about it than he did about the lens. He had found it in Kalak’s treasury soon after becoming the King of Tyr, along with a hundred other magic objects. He had quickly learned how to use it, then forgotten about it until he began to prepare for this trip and realized he would need a way to carry the Dark Lens. He could remember nothing about the sack that would help him escape.

The king raised his hand and thought of the book in which he stored his spells. An instant later he was holding a well-worn volume with a leather-bound cover and parchment pages. Trying to remember all the spells that might help him make sense of his current situation, Tithian opened the book, uttering his angriest curse. This would take time, and time was one thing that he did not have. Sooner or later, the giants would realize that their Oracle was missing. Even more dangerous, Agis might escape the crystal pit and come looking for him.

Tithian fixed his eyes on the mystic runes in his book, impressing his memory with their magical shapes, silently mouthing the strange syllables of the incantation, and rehearsing the awkward gestures his fingers would have to perform to shape the mystic energy when he released it.

It was not until he had memorized his first spell that it occurred to him that there were no living plants inside his satchel. Quite possibly, he would not be able to summon the mystic energy he needed to cast a spell. On other hand, his experiences in the mica tunnel suggested to him that he might be able to use the energy of the lens to cast his spells-albeit with unpredictable results. Tithian put the book aside and reached for the sleeve that he had knotted to seal off the Dark Lens.

The king stopped short of untying it. All around him, above and below as well as to every side, strange eddies had formed in the grayness. They were about as tall as a man, oval in shape, and from the center of each one peered two heavy-lidded eyes. Some eyes were blue, others were brown, green, or black, but no matter what the color, all were equally lifeless and glazed, and all were fixed on Tithian’s face.

“We didn’t expect you so soon, Tithian, but welcome all the same.”

The voice, issuing from beneath a pair of brown eyes, had a bitter, nasal quality that seemed vaguely familiar to the king.

“Where am I?” Tithian demanded, desperately trying to link the voice with a face.

“Nowhere,” chorused a hundred monotonous voices.

The king scowled. “I’m in no mood for jokes,” he warned.

“We never joke,” replied the voice.

“Then answer my question,” Tithian snapped.

“We have.”

Echoes of the same voice began to well up from Tithian’s memory. He had heard it a thousand times, but the lethargic tone seemed sorely out of place, making it difficult for the king to place firmly.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“No one,” came the reply, again from a hundred voices.

“Don’t play games with me!” the king yelled. “I won’t stand for it!”

This brought a chorus of dreary, humorless chuckles.

Tithian untied the sleeve of what had been his cassock, then thrust his hand down to touch the hot surface of the Dark Lens. A surge of energy rushed up his arm, but, much to his surprise, the sensation of movement did not return. Apparently, the lens had reached the end of its journey.

“Tell me who you are,” the king threatened. “Or I’ll use the power of the Dark Lens against you.”

“You’ve already done all the harm to us that you can, my brother.”

This time, Tithian recognized the voice. “Bevus?” he gasped.

“I was Bevus once,” said the figure.

As the voice spoke, the brown-eyed eddy began to coalesce into the form of the king’s long-dead younger brother: a youth of about seventeen years, with the beady brown eyes and hawkish nose so typical of the Mericles line. There the resemblance to Tithian ended, however. Where the king’s features had always been gaunt and sharp, with a hard, bitter edge to them, Bevus’s were well proportioned and warm, with a tender quality that bespoke his sheltered upbringing.

In spite of the fiery energy flooding through him, Tithian suddenly felt so cold he began to shiver. “Then I’m dead?” he gasped.

This brought another chorus of funereal chuckles.

“Worse,” answered Bevus, curling his gray lips into a hateful snarl. “You’re alive, and we want to keep you that way!”

He drifted toward the king, and all of the other gray eddies also began to close in.

“Stay back!” Tithian warned.

Bevus’s face flopped down onto his chest, exposing a bloody, jagged wound in the back of his neck. The slit ran from the base of his skull clear through the spine, stopping just short of the adam’s apple. Barely enough skin remained intact to keep the head from falling off his shoulders. It was, as Tithian remembered, the condition in which the young man’s dead body had been discovered.

The king raised a hand to shield his face and looked away, unable to bear the sight. “In the name of our ancestors!” he cursed. “Think of how you look!”

“You shouldn’t have done it,” came the reply.

Tithian returned his gaze to his brother. Bevus and the others had stopped advancing. “You think I did that?” the king gasped, gesturing at the gruesome wound.

“You deny it?” asked Bevus. His words were muffled and difficult to understand, for he had left his head dangling on his chest.

“Yes, I deny it!” Tithian yelled. As he spoke, he felt a terrible, icy lump where his heart should have been. “I’m not the one who did that to you!”

In truth, the king’s recollections of that time were a fog. He had been a young templar in the Royal Bureau of the Arena when he had learned of his parents’ untimely deaths at the hands of a marauding slave tribe. Two of his compatriots had taken him out to console him with drink, and the conversation had turned to his inheritance. He had angrily berated his brother, accusing Bevus of convincing their parents to disinherit his older sibling in his favor.

Tithian and his friends had drunk some more. Barely able to stand, they had filled their waterskins with wine, hired some kanks, and ridden off toward the Mericles estate. That was all the king had ever remembered of that night.

The next dawn, Tithian had awakened in the desert not far from his family lands. At first, he had thought that his friends had led him into the desert and let him vent his wrath until he passed out from drink and exhaustion-then he had discovered that the robes of all three were soaked with blood. The king remembered being seized by a terrible sense of disgust and hatred. He had killed his two sleeping companions and gone to the irrigation pond at the Asticles estate where he washed both himself and his robes. Once everything had dried, he had hiked down to the house and passed the day weeping in the company of Agis and Lord Asticles, who had assumed he was distraught over the death of his parents and warmly offered their condolences.