Dark Sun: Prism Pentad 4 - Obsidian Oracle (17 page)

As the company passed deeper into the gloom, the calcium stain began to cover the cavern
sides as well as the ceiling, until the whole passage was coated in milky white. At
regular intervals, the skiff passed limestone curtains flowing out of wall fissures, or
shelf formations covered with knobby constellations of dripstone. Like the stalactites,
many of these were scraped and broken, as if something just barely small enough to fit
occasionally passed through the tunnel.

“The odor's getting stronger,” Nymos warned. “Can't you smell it?”

Agis sniffed the breeze, but smelled only stale air and the acrid stench of burning torch
oil.

“It's just a rotting animal,” Kester said, her nostrils flaring. “Nothing to worry about.”

In spite of the tarek's reassurances, the noble drew his sword. The passage meandered back
and forth, growing larger and less cramped with each turn, until the noble could not have
touched his blade to either wall. At the same time, the milky ceiling sloped gradually
upward, and the stalactites were broken nearer and nearer to their tips. The skiff's hull
scraped over several buried obstacles, and the caps of broken stalagmites started to jut
from the dust bed.

Agis was beginning to fear that the skiff would go no farther when the cave intersected
another passage, this one so large that his torch did not illuminate the ceiling or far
wall. The floor, which sloped upward from their tunnel, was littered with broken
stalagmites, weathered ship timbers, and graying skeletons-both beast and human.

“We'd better take a closer look at this,” Agis said. He raised his hand, and Kester
stopped the skiff just a couple of yards shy of the larger cavern's entrance. “Is the
channel too deep for me to wade?”

The tarek eyed the length of plunging pole still showing above the silt. “It's possible,”
she said. “But I wouldn't fancy stepping into a hole.”

Agis sat down on the bow, preparing to slip into the silt channel, and suddenly found
himself gagging for breath. A thick, rancid odor filled the passage, so insufferable that
it made his knees tremble with nausea.

The noble felt an eerie shiver at the base of his skull, and his entire body began to
tingle with spiritual energy. The torch flame flared brilliant white, then abruptly turned
black, plunging the companions into darkness. Had it not been for the soft hiss of burning
oil, Agis would have assumed the fire had died away. But he could feel its heat against
his skin, and, instead of tossing the stick back into the boat, he had to hold the useless
thing in his hand.

“Light, Nymos!” said Kester, her alarmed voice echoing off the cavern walls. “Everything's
gone dark.”

Nymos's claws ticked nervously, and he uttered the incantation of a spell.

“What're ye waiting for?” growled Kester.

“Agis's sword isn't glowing?” the jozhal asked.

“No,” reported Agis. “We're fighting the Way, not sorcery.”

“I feel it, too,” said Tithian. “And the skiff dome is crackling with energy.”

A deafening growl rumbled out of the larger passage, so sonorous and low that it made the
skiff tremble beneath the noble's feet. A wicked presence, as black as the torch flame and
just as scorching, tore into Agis's mind. The invader rampaged through his thoughts,
attacking from behind its mask of darkness. In its wake, it left nothing except searing
anguish and unnatural fear, a fear such as he could not remember feeling before.

Agis tried to form an image of the crimson sun, determined to expose his attacker. The red
disk had barely formed when a huge black claw rose from the murk and swatted it away,
plunging the noble's mind back into darkness.

Nymos shrieked in terror, as did Kester, and even Tithian let a groan escape his lips.
Their reactions did not concern Agis so much as amaze him. He had never faced a mental
onslaught of such raw power and could not imagine an attacker strong enough to press four
such assaults at once.

A loud scrape sounded ahead as something huge forced its way into their small cavern. From
the grating rasps that shuddered down both walls, it seemed to Agis the thing filled the
passage from one side to the other. The noble tried to lift his sword and found that his
arm would not obey his wishes.

“Push us back,” Agis said. “I could use a little distance.”

The skiff lurched into motion. It moved a few yards to the rear, then suddenly stopped.

“Kester?” Agis asked.

No answer came.

“I think the tarek is paralyzed with fear,” Tithian said. “This thing must be powerful.”

A loud snort whooshed through the cavern, sending a rancid wind washing over Agis's face.
The scraping ahead grew louder and deeper, while the muffled clatter of claws on stone
rose from beneath the dust.

Agis called, “Everyone, imagine my sword glowing inside your minds. We all have to fight,
or this thing will beat us.”

As the creature clawed its way toward him, the noble followed his own instructions. For a
moment, the blackness in his mind seemed to grow thicker in response, and he could do no
better than to visualize the faint gray outline of his blade. Then, as the others joined
in, the beast was not strong enough to keep them all plunged into darkness. The noble's
sword, both inside his mind and outside it, illuminated the grotto in glorious white light.

Still, Agis could not concentrate on the cavern around him. Now that the neatly ordered
halls of his mind were illuminated, he saw the reason for his paralysis. On the bloody
floor of a corridor lay his body-or at least he thought it was his body. The corpse had
been terribly mauled, so that the noble could recognize it only by his long black hair and
the Asricles sword clutched in one bloody fist, now glowing with Nymos's light spell.

From the gasps of his companions, the noble could tell that each had found a similar image
inside his own mind.

“See yourselves standing,” Agis said, still fighting to keep the sword lit in his mind.
“We've tired the beast, and now we can defeat it-but we must work together!”

A throaty growl rumbled through the cavern. A heavy paw slapped at the skiff's bow,
filling the passage with silt as it fell just a few feet short of its target. The foot
sank into the dust with an ominous silence, then a loud scraping sound once again filled
the passage as the beast dragged itself forward.

Agis focused his thoughts inside his mind, bracing his mutilated corpse to rise. The
clawed foot of a beast materialized out of the ceiling and stamped down on his chest,
pressing him back to the floor. He hacked at the leg with his glowing sword, showering
himself with hot blood as he cut through ropy tendons and arteries.

Still, the foot did not move.

The noble stopped attacking and spread his arms out to his sides. He visualized his body
changing into a spring-loaded legtrap, such as those used by slave trackers, lirr hunters,
and others who preferred to catch their quarry without fighting it face-to-face. A surge
of spiritual energy rose from within himself, then his arms became the jaws of the trap.
They sprang up and clamped their sharp teeth into the massive leg that had pinned him to
the ground.

The claw jerked back, but Agis's trap held fast The paw twisted and pulled in every
possible direction, tearing the flesh away until raw bone lay exposed on all sides. The
thing continued to struggle for a few moments, until it became apparent the foot could not
be freed.

The leg fell abruptly motionless, and the wounds on Agis's corpse began to heal. The
terrible weight on his chest slowly eased, and the paw faded from his mind.

“I'm free!” Tithian reported.

“Me too,” Agis replied.

As the noble spoke, the torch in his hand returned to its normal color, lighting the
cavern in flickering yellow. Agis's sword, too, was glowing with the white light of the
spell Nymos had cast on it earlier.

The
noble
shook his head clear, then raised his eyes to the creature that had so nearly used the Way
to kill them. When he saw what had crawled into the passage after them, Agis almost wished
that the passage had remained dark. He was staring at a fanged behemoth with a black nose
the size of his own head and a squarish snout longer than the skiff's bow. The beast's
enormous jaws hung parted in exhaustion, the tip of a scarlet tongue just showing from
between its lips, streams of drool running off the flews of its mouth. At the other end of
the muzzle were a pair of tiny, fatigued eyes, set into a round, thick-boned skull covered
by brown fur. Atop the head sat a pair of perky round ears, eerily gentle in their
juxtaposition to the rest of the fearsome mien.

The rest of the creature was even more horrifying than its head. Long tufts of brown fur
rose from the joints of the articulated shell that covered its entire body. Its bulky
shoulders touched the passage walls on both sides, its belly rested on the stalagmites in
the dust bed, and the ridge of its spine pressed against the ceiling.

“Ral protect us!” gasped Kester. “A bear!”

Shaking the cavern with a great roar, the beast pulled itself forward and raised a massive
paw out of the dust bed. Agis dropped his torch and leaped off the deck, bringing his
glowing blade down in a wild slash. The bear's paw came down behind him, splintering the
skiff with a single crunching blow.

With the terrified screams of his companions echoing in his ears, Agis sliced his blade
across the black tip of the bear's snout. He saw a deep gash open in both nostrils, then
felt his feet plunging into the dust. A gray cloud rose up to engulf him, and the beast
roared again.

Agis's ankle scraped down the side of a submerged stalagmite, sending sharp pain up his
leg as it turned against the joint. Fearful of sinking past his head, the noble grasped at
the rocky column with his free arm. He tried to inhale, and it seemed that he took in as
much dust as air. Coughing violently, he swung his sword at the bear's gullet. The blade
clanged off the beast's throat armor without penetrating.

“Kester, help!” Agis croaked.

No answer came.

“Nymos?”

The bear opened its maw and lowered its dripping mouth toward Agis's head. He tried to
fight it off with his sword, but the blade did no more than chip the thing's yellow fangs.
Wheezing down what he feared might be his last breath, the noble pinched his eyes shut,
let his knees fold, and dropped into the dust. He pushed himself blindly forward, grasping
at a stalagmite's smooth stone with his free hand and kicking at the slippery floor with
his feet.

With a ferocious snort, the bear thrust its huge maw after him. Agis felt a swell of
displaced silt surge over his body, then a sharp tooth scraped along his ankle. He jerked
the limb free, kicking madly with the other leg. His foot found purchase on the beasfs
snout and sent him forward. The muffled scrape of tooth on stone rumbled through the dust,
followed by the muted crack of a stalagmite being snapped off at the root.

Agis pushed himself another step forward and rose. His nose barely cleared the dust before
the crown of his head touched the bony armor covering the bear's underside. As soon as he
opened his eyes, they were coated with silt and began to bum horribly, but he could still
see well enough to make out what was happening around him. He turned around to find a pair
of bleeding nostrils sniffing at the dust where he had been standing a moment earlier.
Beyond the beast's muzzle lay a few shards of the shattered skiff that had gotten hung up
on a stalagmite and failed to sink. The smashed bow had been ignited by the torch he had
dropped earlier. By the light of its burning wood, he saw part of Nymos's striped tail
curled around the top of a stalagmite. The noble did pot see any sign of Kester or Tithian.

A knot of remorse formed in the noble's stomach. If the tarek had died, he would miss her.
Even the thought of returning to Tyr without his prisoner sickened him. Assuming he
managed to find the king's body, it would be a poor substitute for the public trial he had
promised to Neeva and the dwarves.

Determined to accomplish at least that much, Agis shuffled forward as fast as he dared. He
moved his feet cautiously along the floor, feeling his way around sinkholes and submerged
stalagmites, trying not to draw the bear's attention back to himself. When he reached the
shoulders, he took a deep breath and plunged the tip of his sword into the creature's
armpit, pushing upward with all his strength.

The blade sank to the hilt, and hot blood poured down Agis's arm. The bear bellowed in
fury and wrenched its head around, snapping at its attacker with slavering jaws. The noble
ducked beneath the maw and, fearing the dying beast would collapse on top of him, dove
forward. The bear's paw sliced through the silt after him.

It caught Agis just as he passed the base of a thick stalagmite. The stone pillar snapped
with a muffled thud, then the noble's body erupted into pain, and his mouth opened to
scream. He found himself choking as silt poured down his air passage. In the next instant,
the bear's paw lifted Agis out of the dust, flinging both him and the broken stalagmite
across the cavern.

Agis crashed into the wall, then dropped back into the dust and sank like a stone.
Fighting back black waves of unconsciousness, the noble tried to push himself upright. His
feet slipped into a sinkhole, and he lashed out with his arms, hoping to catch hold of
another stalagmite.

Instead, he found a burly leg, A pair of powerful hands slipped under his arms, then he
was pulled out of the dust and spun around in one quick motion. Agis found himself grasped
securely in the burly arms of a tarek, his back to her brawny chest and two large fists
clasped together over his abdomen.

“Kester!” The name did not escape his lips, for his lungs were burning from the lack of
air, and his throat was clogged with silt.

The tarek pulled the heels of her hands into the pit of Agis's stomach, at the same time
bearing down on his torso and sending bolts of agonizing pain through his battered ribs.
The last few breaths of air in his chest rushed out of his mouth, carrying along the silt
that had been obstructing his air passages. The noble coughed several times, wracking his
body with more pain, then the breath returned to his lungs. With it came the terrible pain
of the three deep gashes that the bear's claws had opened along the side of his body. Agis
could only imagined what would have happened to him if the beast had not been forced to
tear a stalagmite out by its roots to reach him.