Troy Denning: The Obsidian Oracle

“Take your place at the floater’s dome,” Agis ordered.

Tithian shook his head. “I think not,” he said.

“Don’t make me send my griffin in to take control of your mind,” the noble threatened.

“I’ll admit that you put up a valiant fight, Agis,” Tithian allowed, a condescending sneer on his cracked lips. “But do you really think you’re powerful enough to overcome the Oracle?”

A series of terrified shrieks erupted from the bow, then Agis saw one of the slaves who had gone to fight the fire rise into the air, impaled on the wyvern’s severed tail. The noble turned his attention inward, bringing his griffin to its feet.

Exhausted by the fight and his efforts to keep the Shadow Viper afloat, the noble was too slow. The wyvern’s tail arced across the deck and pierced deep into the griffin’s breast. The stinging poison flooded through his chest in an instant, filling it with a scalding vapor that turned everything it touched to ash. Agis felt as though his heart were bursting into flame. He heard himself howling-not in pain, but in outrage-and everything went dark.

Tithian withdrew from the noble’s still mind and found himself on a sinking ship. Without Agis to keep it afloat, the Shadow Viper was going down fast. Already, the main deck had disappeared beneath the bay, and dust was pouring over the gunnels of the quarterdeck in billowing waves. The closest Joorsh was just three steps away from grabbing the caravel’s stern, and panicked slaves were calling for mercy from the giants.

Tithian went to Agis’s side. The noble lay slumped over the floater’s stone, blood seeping from his ears and nostrils, his glazed eyes focused on nothing. A red froth poured from his mouth. No breath-shallow or otherwise-passed his dead lips.

“Don’t try to save him!” objected Wyan, hovering at Tithian’s side. “There isn’t time!”

“I’m over that folly,” said Tithian, taking the noble’s hand. “But I need something of Agis’s.”

The king slipped the Asticles signet off the noble’s finger, then the whole ship jerked. He looked back to see that a Joorsh had grabbed the stern rail and was preventing the caravel from sinking any farther into the silt.

Tithian let the noble’s hand drop, grabbed the satchel, and launched himself into the air, barely escaping the giant’s clumsy attempt to swat him down. With the warrior’s angry voice roaring in his ears, he flapped his wings hard and quickly rose into the olive sky. Once the king was safely out of reach, he began to circle slowly so that Wyan could catch up to him.

While he waited, he watched in amusement as the frustrated Joorsh plucked crewmen from the Shadow Viper’s deck and hurled them at him. The tenth slave was just arcing down toward the silt when Wyan finally arrived …

“You fool!” snarled the disembodied head. “You nearly lost the Oracle-and for what? A souvenir?”

“This is no souvenir,” Tithian replied, holding the ring out to him. “Open your mouth.”

Frowning in puzzlement, Wyan obeyed. Tithian placed Agis’s ring on the head’s gray tongue.

“Take this to Rikus and Sadira,” the king ordered. “Tell them that they’re to meet Agis in the village of Samarah. The time has come to kill the Dragon.”

Cursing the long, echoing halls of the Asticles mansion, Neeva rounded the corner at a dead run. At last she saw the nursery at the end of the corridor. Its ivory door, engraved with a grinning jackal’s face, was closed tight. She drew both her swords without missing a step.

“Rkard!” she yelled. “What’s wrong?”

No answer. For her son, that was even more unusual than the terrified wail that had alarmed her in the first place. Neeva did not even stop at the closed portal, simply kicking it off its leather hinges on her way through.

A pair of huge, hideous monsters stood on the opposite side of the room, peering through the large window where Rkard usually waited to greet the dawn sun. They were hardly more than skeletal lumps, with twisted shards of bone sticking out of their shoulders in the place of arms. One figure had a hunched back and a slope-browed skull, while the other had a squat neck and no head at all. Regardless of whether they had heads or not, pairs of orange embers burned where their eyes should have been. Where the chins had hung, coarse masses of gray dangled in the air, unattached to bone or flesh of any kind.

As Neeva charged across the room, they backed out of sight. She thrust her swords out the window, then leaned through, ready to attack with a vicious series of slashes and thrusts.

They were gone. The only thing she saw outside the second story window were acres and acres of Asticles faro trees.

From inside the room, Rkard’s small voice said, “Don’t kill them, Mother. They didn’t mean to scare me.”

Neeva turned around and found her son hiding in the corner, his red eyes bulging from their sockets as he stared at his lap.

“What did they …”

Noticing what her son was staring at, Neeva let the question trail off. Across his tiny lap lay the Belt of Rank, and on his head, cocked at a steep angle to keep it from falling off, was King Rkard’s bejeweled crown.

Neeva sheathed her swords and knelt in front of her son. “Rkard-where did you get these?”

The young mul fixed his red eyes on her, and she saw something in them that she had never before seen: tears, ready to spill down his chiseled cheeks. Rkard clamped his jaw closed to keep it from quivering.

Finally, he seemed to gather his strength. “Jo’orsh and Sa’ram brought them to me,” he answered. “They said I’m going to kill Borys.”