Dark Sun: Prism Pentad 4 - Obsidian Oracle (31 page)

During her travels, Tithian knew, Sadira had learned that the horrid monsters called New
Beasts were created by the untamed magic flowing from the Pristine Tower. If so, it seemed
likely that the Dark Lens was the tool Rajaat had used to control that magic. The king
reasoned that the ancient sorcerer had relied on the Way to shape the tower's mystic
energies, then used the power of the lens to give them a physical reality. The process was
not so different than that by which Tithian had bestowed Rikus's body on himself.

As the last pains of his change faded away, the king looked down and saw a pair of bulging
thighs where his scrawny legs had been a moment before. Noting that they were even covered
by the thick coppery skin of a mul, Tithian straightened his knees, thrusting the Dark
Lens completely into the bag.

No sooner had the Oracle disappeared than the satchel mouth returned to its normal size,
tightening around Tithian's new legs. Silently congratulating himself for a job well done,
he tried to push the sack down over his knees so he could withdraw his feet.

The king suddenly found his buttocks scraping across the floor. Before he realized what
was happening, the satchel slipped over his hips and started up his chest. A numbing cold
spread over him from breastbone down, save his feet still burned where they touched the
lens. He cried out in astonishment and scratched at the floor, cutting his fingertips on
the sharp edges of mica sheets.

Despite the strength of his new body, Tithian could barely stop himself. The Dark Lens
seemed to be falling, dragging him into the satchel after it. The king tried to kick away
from the hot glass, but to little avail. His feet remained fused to its surface.

Great clumps of floor tore away in Tithian's hands, and he slipped farther into the
satchel. The mouth of the bag came up past his armpits and over his head, engulfing him in
a cold, formless world. The king lashed out and caught the edges of the satchel. It began
to turn in on itself.

Fighting against the tide of panic rising inside him, Tithian tried to break contact with
the lens by visualizing himself standing on a granite floor. For an instant, his soles
were filled with pain, and he smelled the acrid stench of charred flesh. The Oracle
separated from his feet.

Tithian instantly began to change back into the scrawny, sickly-looking ruin of a man he
had been before bestowing himself with the traits of a mul's body. Waves of pain rolled
through his limbs and torso as each group of muscles shriveled back to normal size. This
time, he felt every instant of the agony acutely.

Despite the pain, Tithian retained his grip on the satchel and endured the transformation
while floating just inside the sack's mouth. He did not feel the burden of his own weight,
and no longer did he experience any sensation of up or down, sideways or forward, or even
of past and present. He simply existed, connected to the outside world only by the tenuous
grip of his aching fingers.

With each passing moment, the Dark Lens appeared to grow smaller and smaller. Tithian
assumed that the change in size meant it was falling away from him, but he could not be
sure. In the formless gray world inside the satchel, there was nothing by which he could
gauge movement or direction. The lens simply seemed to be shrinking, until it now appeared
no larger than his own head.

Even through the pain of his ongoing transformation, Tithian realized that it was not
normal for an item to fall away so rapidly. Usually, he just opened his hand, and the
object drifted away as if buoyed on a cloud. The king stretched out one of his hands and
pictured it resting on the lens, attempting to summon the artifact in the same way he
would summon any other.

Nothing happened, save that the lens continued to fall away. A cold lump of fear formed in
the pit of Tithian's stomach. “Come to me!” he screamed.

The lens did not stop falling. Tithian closed his eyes and visualized it resting in the
palm of his hand. As he summoned the spiritual energy to use the Way, he felt himself
being drawn toward it. Again, the sack began to turn in on itself, and he knew he could
not continue to hold it while trying to recover the lens. He had to make a choice: release
his grasp on the mouth of the satchel, or lose the Dark Lens.

Tithian opened his hand and released the satchel.

There was no sensation of movement, nothing drifting past in the horrible grayness to mark
the passage of distance. The king knew that he moved only because the satchel opening was
growing smaller and the lens was growing larger. He could not feel the air brushing his
face as he slipped through it, or even whether the temperature was hot or cold. Tithian
simply felt numb.

Some time later, the king caught the Oracle. It might have been a few moments or a day
that had passed, Tithian could not tell. He had no more sensation of time than he did of
distance. All he knew for sure was that he struck the lens with a terrible jolt. Again, he
felt a surge of fiery energy rise through his body without causing him pain, then he sat
down on the lens, held fast by the mystical energy he was drawing from its depths.

After he had re-established contact with the Oracle, the sensation of falling returned to
Tithian's stomach, and he felt a cold breeze brushing past his face. The king slowly
turned, looking in all directions, trying to find some means of further orienting himself.
He saw nothing but the opening from which he had come, glowing red with the sun's light
and rapidly vanishing.

Hoping to stop the lens's fall before the opening disappeared entirely, Tithian visualized
himself as a wyvern. In his mind's eye, he saw the long, barbed tail wrapped around the
lens below, his huge leathery wings beating the air furiously in an attempt to raise
himself and his cargo up to the opening.

Energy sizzled from the lens into his body, and his back and shoulder blades burned with
fierce, blistering pain. In the next moment, the stumps of a tail and two wings sprouted
from his body. As the appendages steadily grew longer and larger, their roots sent long
tendrils of anguish burrowing through his body. He began to shudder uncontrollably, though
as much from fear that he would lose the Dark Lens- or be lost with it-as from his pain.

Gulping down his misery and shock, Tithian waited until the agonizing transition was
complete and the unbearable pain subsided. Then, making sure his tail was securely wrapped
around the lens, he flapped his new wings as hard as he could. The air throbbed with each
stroke, and the gray mists swirled around him like smoke on a windy day.

The king and his lens continued to fall. He looked up and saw nothing but a crimson dot
where he had hoped to see the satchel opening.

Forgetting about his wings, Tithian leaned over the side of the Oracle and peered into the
grayness below. He opened himself to the power of the lens once more and used the Way to
visualize the satchel opening directly beneath himself. Again, he felt his body erupt with
fiery energy. An instant later, the crimson dot appeared below the Oracle.

“By Rajaat, yes!” Tithian cried. “If we can't fly up to the exit, we'll fall out of it!”

No sooner had he spoken than the king suddenly felt as though he were beneath the Oracle
instead of on top of it, and he knew he was once again falling away from his goal. As
Tithian watched, the satchel opening faded from a dot to a point, then blinked out of
sight altogether. He could not tell why he had failed. The lens might have changed the
direction of its movement, or simply turned over so that he was looking at the exit from
its bottom instead of the top. In either case, all he knew for sure was that he had been
traveling toward the dot one moment, and away from it the next.

Tithian folded his wings in despair and settled down to consider his situation, keeping
his wyvern's tail securely wrapped around the lens. The king felt ready to burst from the
dozen conflicting emotions welling up inside him. An angry rush filled his ears, and never
in his life had he wanted so desperately to kill someone-but who could he blame for his
current troubles?

At the same time, in his lower abdomen, an icy ball of horror grew steadily larger. After
Borys had returned Sacha and Wyan to him, he had decided to store them in this satchel
precisely because it seemed a difficult place from which to escape. Did the fact that they
had never escaped mean that escape was impossible?

What Tithian felt most, though, was the tangled knot of frustration snarled in his chest.
He had planned every step of his journey, prepared for every contingency, and overcome
every obstacle-from Agis's pursuit to escaping the crystal pit-for what? So he could fall
into his satchel and die? He could not accept that possibility, but neither did he seem
able to escape it.

The king took a long series of deep breaths, trying to calm himself, and attempted to
focus his thoughts on solutions to his problem. Clearly, something about the nature of the
Dark Lens made it behave differently inside the sack. Perhaps it had something to do with
the nature of obsidian, the king decided. It seemed reasonable to assume the same
properties that made the glassy mineral so useful to sorcerer-kings and other powerful
mages might interfere with the satchel's mystic nature.

Tithian held out his hand and thought of one of the obsidian balls he had placed into the
satchel before leaving Tyr. A black dot appeared in the grayness below, then streaked up
to land in his palm in the same instant. There was nothing strange about the way it came
to him.

“It's not the obsidian,” Tithian muttered, tossing the ball aside.

The globe hovered in the air, lingering behind the plummeting lens and fading out of sight
as quickly as it had appeared. Next, thinking the magical nature of the lens might be the
problem, the king opened his hand and thought of the forked wand he had used to lead him
to the Oracle in the first place. Again, it appeared instantly, then simply drifted away
when he tossed it aside.

That left only the strange red glow swimming through the surface of the lens. Perhaps the
artifact's strange energy interfered with the satchel's magic. The king thought briefly
about trying to drain it of power, hoping it would behave like an ordinary piece of
obsidian, but thought better of that idea. He had no idea how long that might take, or if
it could be recharged once he had done it.

Tithian removed his black cassock, slitting the tattered shift in the back so he could
pull it over his cumbersome wings. When he had finally succeeded, he spread the garment
over the top of the Oracle. Holding it securely in place with his wyvern's tail, the king
reached through a sleeve to touch the hot surface of the lens itself.

He visualized his cloak growing larger and darker, spreading over the entire Oracle to
form a taut shroud, as impervious to energy-mystic or otherwise-as it was black. A fiery
surge rose through Tithian's hand, then passed through his body and into the tattered
cassock.

Before the king's eyes, the many rips and tears in the cloth drew together, sealing
themselves so tightly that no sign remained of them. The robe stretched at all comers,
creeping over the surface of the lens until it had sealed every inch beneath a seamless
cover.

Even where Tithian's tail passed through the cover, the cloth melted into his leathery
hide without any visible joint.

Tithian removed his hand from what had been the sleeve of his cassock. Once he tied it
off, he lost all sensation of movement. His body began to drift, and, had it not been for
his wyvern's tail still wrapped securely around it, he would have become separated from
the lens.

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 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.