Troy Denning - The Obsidian Oracle

It had not been until three days later, after he had returned to his duties in the Bureau of the Arena, that he had heard how someone had brutally murdered his brother. Of course, there had been those who whispered that Tithian had murdered his younger brother to recover the Mericles fortune, but Agis and his father had steadfastly maintained that Tithian could not have been responsible, as he had been at their estate, mourning. No more questions had been asked, since the Asticles name was well-known for honesty-and since King Kalak had seen good advantage in having a wealthy noble serve in the ranks of his templars.

Bevus said, “A man always knows who his murderer is-even if the coward hides behind another’s face!”

“It couldn’t have been me. I passed that night at the Asticles mansion,” he said, falling back on his customary alibi.

“You’re choking on your own lies,” Bevus scoffed. “You killed me.”

“Never!”

“An’ I suppose ye never killed me?” growled a tarek’s lifeless voice.

Voice after voice asked the same question. There were nobles who had speculated too openly that Tithian might have been responsible for not only the death of his brother, but of his parents as well. Several voices belonged to templars who had stood in his way as he climbed the ranks of the king’s bureaucracy, and others to slaves who had tried to escape his service. There were even the voices of a few noble ladies and templar priestesses, heartless women who had laughed at a young man’s awkward advances.

Tithian recognized all of the voices, and he remembered killing each and every one of them-not by issuing an order or passing a coin over some bard’s palm, but murdering them himself. Sometimes, if they were weaker than he was, he had strangled them with his own hands. If they were stronger, he had planted a dagger in their backs at unsuspecting moments. For the cautious ones, there had been poison. For the slaves who had thought dying to be easier than serving their master, always some slow and hideous death to prove them wrong.

The king remembered the details of each and every murder right down to what he had been wearing, what the victim had said as he or she fell, even the foul odors that had come from their bodies as they expired. The only exception was the murder of Bevus, which, with the same certainty that he remembered committing all the other murders, he knew he could not have done.

“Do you remember now?” Bevus asked, starting to advance again.

“Stop!” Tithian yelled, opening his body to the fiery energy of the lens. “I didn’t kill you then-but I will now.”

Bevus stopped at Tithian’s side and laid a hand on the king’s wing. “You fool-you can’t kill a dead man. Do you think we would have brought you into the Gray if you could hurt us now?”

“You lured me down here?” Tithian roared.

“We called the lens,” confirmed Kester’s voice. “Ye followed it.”

“Yes, Kester knew you would,” Bevus confirmed. “She said it would be the one thing you valued more than your life.”

A chill finger scraped down Tithian’s leathery wing, drawing a howl of agony. It felt as though Bevus were ripping away a strip of hide, but when the king looked over his shoulder, he saw that was not the case. His brother’s incorporeal finger had penetrated his flesh without tearing it, causing a painful welt that seemed to be the sole injury caused by the digit’s passage.

“And do you know what the best part is? I can keep doing this forever, and you’ll never die!”

Tithian screamed and flailed at his brother’s face. His hands sank right through Bevus’s chin. As spirits, it seemed his captors could not be harmed bodily. But, as the king knew better than anyone, the worst pain was seldom physical-and after the trouble they had caused him by bringing him into the Gray, he had every intention of making them suffer now more than they had in life.

Tithian looked at the nearest set of eyes. Recognizing the voice as that of Grakidi, a young slave he had once used as an example to keep Rikus from trying to escape, the king visualized himself laying a purple caterpillar on a slave boy’s upper lip.

Grakidi’s terrified face appeared in the center of the eddy, and the caterpillar instantly crawled up his nose. An instant later, blood began to stream from both nostrils, and the slave screamed in terror as the eddy faded from sight.

Tithian forced a smile across his lips, feebly trying to ignore the pain of his terrible wounds. “You see? You can kill a dead man-over and over,” he sneered, glancing over his shoulder at the third welt that his brother was raising on his wing. “What are a few scratches compared to the joy of murdering you all again?”

As he spoke, he fixed his gaze on a set of lavender eyes. They belonged to Deva, a young noblewoman who had been fond of Bevus, and who had lacked the good sense not to voice her suspicions in public. She had been one of his less imaginative murders. Still, when he visualized an obsidian blade pressing against her throat, the woman screamed and vanished before the tip could pierce her skin.

More than half of the other spirits also succumbed to the terror tactics, fading silently into the Gray. The others were not so easy to chase off. Assuming forms that resembled the bodies they had occupied in life, they crowded around, gouging at Tithian’s face with talonlike fingers and ripping at his flesh with keen-edged teeth. As with Bevus, each attack sent an icy bolt of pain shooting through his flesh, and ugly welts began to rise over his entire body.

Shrieking with pain, Tithian fought back in the only way he could, by identifying each of his attackers and recreating their deaths. Using the power of the Dark Lens, he fashioned a dozen different kinds of murderous utensils: the dagger he had used to kill the templars who had accompanied him into the desert, the looped wires with which he had choked unsuspecting rivals, the lingering poisons he had so graciously poured for women who spurned him, the rare venomous beetles he had sent scurrying under the door of a hated superior, even the crude axe he had once used to vent his wrath on an undeserving servant. With each attack, another spirit screamed and vanished, leaving one less set of claws to rake at him. Had it not been for his own agony, the king might well have enjoyed his encounter with the spirits.

At last, after Tithian had recreated the dagger that he had plunged into Kester’s back just a few hours earlier, only two spirits remained: Bevus and one other that he did not recognize. Although his brother continued to torment him, slowly running a claw down his spine, the second spirit remained motionless. It had neither spoken nor laughed the whole time, and its beady black eyes did nothing to help the king identify who it had been. Tithian racked his brain, trying to remember all of the people he had murdered and match them with someone that he had chased off, but he could not think of who this last spirit could be.

“You have an excellent memory for murder,” snickered Bevus.

The king hardly heard, so awash was he in pain. From head to foot, his body seemed nothing but a single, aching welt. Even his wings were so red and abused that they looked like the twin dorsal crests of some deformed lizard. He felt dizzy and sick from the pain, perilously close to falling unconscious.

“It’s too bad you can’t remember how you killed me,” Bevus continued. “Perhaps it’s because you were in such a drunken stupor.”

Fighting through his pain, Tithian visualized a large steel-bladed axe that had been in the Mericles family for years. It had been found in the desert several weeks after the murder and was commonly assumed to be the murder weapon.