The Obsidian Oracle

FOURTEEN THE OBSIDIAN ORACLE

Tithian stared into the utter blackness of the Dark Lens, trying to comprehend what he saw-or rather, didn’t see. Shaped like an egg and about the size of a small kank, the Oracle’s surface glimmered with the sheen of polished obsidian. Through this glassy skin swam languorous streaks of scarlet, often vanishing from one place and, in the same instant, reappearing another. But beneath these torpid lights, the king saw nothing-unless inviolable gloom could be called something.

The king had looked into obsidian depths many times before, and always he had found some hint of light: a gray-streaked flaw, tiny bubbles with a pale gleam trapped inside, an impurity that gave the whole stone a colored tint. Not so here. The blackness of the Oracle was more absolute than at the bottom of Tyr’s deepest iron mines, or even inside the cryptic dungeons of the Golden Palace. More than the absence of light, the lens held within it the embodiment of darkness.

Tithian smiled. Had he been born a dwarf instead of a human, his life’s focus would surely have been to find this lens.

The king shuffled forward, stepping out of the mica tunnel and into the small chamber with the Dark Lens. The room was lit by a curtain of crimson rays spilling down from above. When Tithian looked up to find their source, he was astonished to see the sun’s fiery orb shining down through a wide fissure that ran the entire length of the ceiling. The crack was just a little wider than a man, and, like the room itself, lined with glistening sheets of mica.

As Tithian tottered forward on his old man’s legs, the uneven floor crackled with each step, the ends of mica sheets bending and popping beneath his weight. He felt a sweltering heat rising from the Oracle. The closer he approached, the more flushed and tender his skin felt. Beneath his robes, sweat began to roll down his body in runnels, and soon wisps of steam were rising from the finely woven hemp of his garments.

At last Tithian reached out and touched the glassy surface of the lens. A soft sizzle rose from beneath his fingertips and searing pain shot through his hands.

Without removing his hands from the hot glass, Tithian worked his way around the lens, his heart pounding with anticipation as he ran his fingers over every inch of its searing surface. He did not stop until he felt blisters rising on his wrinkled flesh.

“By Ral, not a flaw anywhere!” Tithian cried, his voice trembling not with agony, but exhilaration. “Nothing but the Dark Lens could be so perfect!”

Continuing to whisper the word “perfect” over and over, the king went to the narrowest end of the lens and placed his satchel on the ground. Putting one foot just inside the mouth, he grabbed the other side and pulled. Slowly the orifice began to widen, the sack’s magical cloth stretching to many times its original size. As the aperture grew large enough to walk into, Tithian felt a cool breeze and saw a whirling gray murk inside.

When the king had stretched the sack as far as his arms would allow, he placed the satchel’s mouth over the narrow end of the lens and pulled. As the Oracle slowly passed inside, the opening expanded almost to the point of tearing, but the body of the satchel did not bulge or swell at all. To all appearances, it looked and felt as empty as it ever had.

Eventually, Tithian pulled the sack up to the point where the lens touched the floor. Stretching his arms wide, he reached around the back of the Oracle and grabbed both sides of the bag. He pressed his chest and face against the glass and rocked the huge stone, each time pulling the satchel a little farther along. Soon, only the end remained outside.

His chest heaving from his exertions and his face burning where it had been in contact with the hot glass, Tithian sat down on the floor and braced his feet against the lens. With a feeble groan, he pushed against the stone, at the same time pulling on his magic sack. Aching knots of pain formed in his thighs and forearms, but the lens did not move. His newly aged muscles were not up to the task.

Cursing his weakness, Tithian closed his eyes and opened a pathway to his spiritual nexus, preparing to use the Way. To his surprise, he did not feel the familiar surge of energy rising from deep within himself. Instead, his feet seemed to meld with the lens, and the heat of its surface ceased to burn his soles. A torrent of energy rushed from the Oracle up through his legs. The stream flowed into his abdomen, where he had expected to feel the warm tingle of his own energies, and formed a smoldering knot that seemed ready to burst into flames.

The king felt more excited than afraid. That the energy had come to him through the obsidian sphere only confirmed what he had guessed earlier: it had to be the Dark Lens.

Putting his growing delight out of his mind, Tithian pictured the most powerful gladiator he had ever owned. An image of Rikus slowly emerged inside his mind: a rugged face, pointed ears set close to a bald pate, and a hairless body that seemed nothing but knotted sinew and thick bone.

Once he had the picture securely locked in his thoughts, the king substituted his own face for Rikus’s. The expressive black eyes were replaced by beady brown ones, the heavy-boned features became thin and haggard, and a long tail of graying hair dangled from what had once been a bald head. The resulting image, an old man’s gaunt face sitting upon a mul’s powerful shoulders, seemed ludicrous even to the king.

Tithian opened himself to the fire in his stomach, calling on it to empower the image he had created. The energy rushed into his sinews, charging them with new life and vitality. In his bones and joints he felt a suppleness that he had not experienced in decades. The king flexed his muscles, rejoicing in his body’s newfound vigor-then screamed.

A burst of agony shot through Tithian’s arms. The muscles began to swell, taking on the dimensions and shape of those he had pictured on Rikus’s body. The change did not occur solely inside his head, nor was it illusory, as he would normally expect from using the Way. The power of the lens was actually transforming him.

Tithian watched in astonishment as the rest of his body changed into that of a mul. After his arms came his shoulders and neck, then his chest, back, and stomach. Each transformation brought a fresh surge of pain, but it barely registered on his stunned mind. The king was too busy contemplating the significance of what was happening to dwell on his discomfort.

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 corners, 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 of 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.

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 tunnel 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, 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 the 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 that 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 where he 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 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.

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 …

It was no use. Tithian could remember no more.

The king looked toward the last spirit. “Were you there that night?” he asked. “Perhaps you were one of my brother’s guards?”

“Weak fool!”

Tithian’s jaw dropped as he realized the identity of the last eddy. “King Kalak!” he gasped. “I didn’t kill you!”

“Of course not. The honor belongs to that jackal, Agis, and his friends,” hissed Kalak, coalescing into solid form. Although he had been well on his way to becoming a dragon when Tithian had last seen him, he now assumed the shape of a skinny old man with a bald, scaly pate and a face buried beneath wrinkles. “You merely betrayed me to them.”

“Then what are you doing here?” Tithian asked.

“I came to see if I should help you,” said Kalak. “I thought you might avenge my death-but I see that’s unlikely. You’re as big a coward as ever. If you can’t face your brother’s murder, you’ll never murder Agis.”

“I didn’t kill Bevus!” Tithian protested, his pained voice a mere croak. “Everyone else-but not him.”

“I know what happened,” snorted Kalak. “You called on my magic-”

“King Kalak, no!” protested Bevus, reaching out to quiet the old man.

Kalak slapped the hand away, then continued to address Tithian. “When I saw how you killed your brother, Tithian, I ranked you a true murderer-as fine as any since Rajaat,” Kalak said. He paused a moment, then shook his ancient head in disgust and reached up to take the battered circlet from Tithian’s welt-covered head. “But I was wrong. You don’t deserve this.”

Kalak flung the crown into the grayness, then looked back to Bevus. “If you really want to torture your brother, I suggest you let him go.”

“Why should I help him?” demanded the spirit.

“You wouldn’t be helping, fool. Tithian can’t remember murdering you, and he balks every time he has the chance to kill Agis,” the sorcerer-king sneered. “If a coward like him uses the Dark Lens against Borys, nothing you can think of will compare to what the Dragon does to him.”

As Kalak faded away, Bevus turned to consider his brother’s tormented form. “I think Kalak is underestimating me,” he said, reaching for Tithian’s eyes. “Don’t you?”

The king turned his head away, fighting through his pain to keep his mind clear. Bevus began to harass him, tracing agonizing circles around the king’s eye sockets, moving just slowly enough so that Tithian could always look away in time to save his eyes.

As he was tormented, the king focused his thoughts on saving himself. He did not try to remember what had happened the night of Bevus’s death, but concentrated only on accepting that the first person he had ever murdered had been his younger brother.

A sickening pall of self-loathing settled over Tithian, and for a moment he was more conscious of it than of the physical pain tormenting his body. He felt a foul darkness welling up inside himself, coming from a recess so deep and hidden that he had not even known it existed. As the guilty secret rose into the light, he recognized it for the hideous beast it was-but instead of recoiling from the terrible knowledge, he embraced it as a part of himself.

All at once, a placid sense of relief descended over Tithian. He understood what had happened on that brutal night, and why everything since had come so easily for him: his rise through the templar ranks, his consolidation of the family fortune, even the fortuitous alliance that had made a king of him. And he also understood why, when all else had failed and no amount of treachery or bribery would win him what he wanted, he had always relished the final option-insisting, whenever practical, that he perform the deed with his own hands.

Now that he thought about it, Bevus’s death had been his starting point, the moment when he had discovered what he really enjoyed in life, and when his destiny had become clear to him.

The king raised his arms to embrace his brother, saying, “Come to me.” As he spoke, he used the Way to change his body into the ghostly semblance of a matronly woman. She had graying hair and sparkling brown eyes, with a slender nose, high cheekbones, and a stern, yet pleasant smile. “Yes, my son,” Tithian said, speaking in the soothing voice of his mother. “Give me one last embrace before we say good-bye.”

As Tithian’s arms closed around his brother’s shoulders, Bevus looked up with horror-stricken eyes. “No!” he screamed.

“Yes,” Tithian replied, pressing his lips to the young man’s cheek. At the same time, the king raised his hand and summoned his bone stiletto. When the weapon appeared in his hand, he brought the blade down between his brother’s shoulder blades. “Good-bye, Bevus.”