The Obsidian Oracle

EPILOGUE

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.”