Dark Sun: Prism Pentad 4 - Obsidian Oracle (32 page)

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 runnel
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 and 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 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

:hat 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. There, he had 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.

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 Merides 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 faffing 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.

Bevus merely laughed. “It wasn't the axe, dear brother,” he said, flopping his
half-severed neck around. “Your friends didn't do this to me until after I was dead.”

Tithian closed his eyes, trying again to remember what had happened that night. He and the
two templars had dragged the liveryman out of bed, claiming they were on official business
so they would not have to pay for his kanks. They had galloped the beasts through the dark
streets, trampling a half-dozen derelicts too drunk to leap out of the way. At the night
gate, they had merrily bragged to the guards that when they returned they would be wealthy
men, and they had ridden into the desert. After that...