Dark Sun: Prism Pentad 4 - Obsidian Oracle (14 page)

'No!“ snapped Nymos. ”Our chances are much setter on the back side. With the dust curtain
hiding us, it could be days before they realize we've landed."

“I'm afraid not. Our masts will give us
away,”
said Kester, gesturing at the great shafts that towered so high above the decks. “I'm just
hopin' it will take 'em longer to catch us.”

“What are you talking about?” asked Nymos, turning his slender head from side to side in
an attempt to gain some sense of Kester's concern.

“The masts extend above the dust curtain,” Agis explained. “I don't suppose you could hide
them, could you Nymos?”

The jozhal thought for a moment, then said, “I can't hide the masts.” He pulled a small
wand from his stomach pouch. At the end of the stick was a tiny mask. “But I can disguise
them as giants.”

Kester rubbed her lumpy head in thought, then shrugged. “Go ahead and try,” she said. “I
don't see how ye can make matters any worse.”

With that, the tarek returned to her usual station, and Nymos scurried off to work his
magic on the masts. The
Shadow Viper
skirted Mytilene's shore slowly, steadily riding lower in the dust as Agis grew sicker and
more fatigued. Soon, in addition to his nausea, the noble felt feverish and weak, and
rivulets of bitter-smelling sweat ran down his brow. He began to think he would have to
call for a chaperon to keep him alert, then Kester's voice boomed across the deck.

“Foredeck squads to their ballistae!” she ordered. “Crew one, raise the keel. All others,
furl the sails!”

At the far end of the ship, a dozen sailors worked the ballistae windlasses, cranking back
the arms on three separate engines. Within moments, the weapons were loaded with heavy
harpoons, the ends ripped with barbed heads as thick as a dwarf's body.

On the main deck, a group of nervous slaves gathered around the capstan and leaned into
the crossbars, winding a thick black rope around a massive wooden drum. As the line was
gathered up, it pulled the keel-a mekillot's shoulder-blade-out of the deck's center slot.
The bone had been laboriously carved into a finlike shape, and polished to a smooth sheen
to keep silt from clinging to it.

While their comrades struggled to raise the keel, the rest of the slaves crawled up the
masts and out onto the yardarms. Slowly, they pulled the heavy sails up to the wooden
beams and secured them into place with quick-release knots. By the time they had finished,
the
Shadow Viper's
progress had slowed to a near standstill.

Agis heard Nymos utter a magical command word, then saw the jozhal standing amidships,
gesturing at each mast with his tiny wand. A trio of giants appeared where the masts had
been. They were all somewhat smaller and less hairy than Fylo, with lanky builds and
rough, sun-bronzed hides. On the shoulders of the first sat a ram's head, on the second an
eagle's, and on the third a serpent's.

“Man the plunging poles!” Kester ordered. The tarek was peering through her king's eye,
her gaze fixed far ahead of the ship. “Ahead slow.”

The crew took their positions and began to push. To Agis, this part of the journey seemed
to take as long as the trip around the island. Once he almost retched, while another time
he found himself gasping for breath as though he had been running. Still, the noble
managed to hang on, and soon the craggy silhouette of a shoreline loomed just a few dozen
yards off the bow.

“Ready the gangways,” Kester called, still peering through the king's eye.

The slaves had barely moved to their positions when a lookout's voice echoed down from the
crow's nest. “Giant to starboard!” There was a short pause, then he added, “Four more to
port!”

“So much for disguises,” Kester growled, lowering her king's eye. “How close?” she yelled,
raising her gaze to the top of the main mast.

When the tarek saw three beasthead giants standing on her deck, her leathery skin went
pale. At first, Agis thought it was Nymos's illusion that had flustered the tarek, but he
quickly realized that was not the case.

“Not beastheads!” the tarek gasped.

In the same instant, a hulking silhouette came into view off the port bow, six braids of
hair sweeping back and forth like pendulums as he waded out to intercept the
Shadow Viper.
Although the dust curtain prevented the noble from getting a good look at the giant's
face, he could see enough to tell that it was more or less human, with a blocky shape and
a hooked nose as long as a battle-axe. As the noble watched, the colossus lifted his arms
over his head, raising a huge boulder as high the
Shadow Viper's
tallest mast.

“Go away, you filthy Saram!” he boomed.

As the giant cocked his arms to throw, Kester yelled, “Fire at will!”

Agis heard the sonorous throb of a skein releasing its tension. A tree-sized harpoon
rasped off a ballista and sailed straight at the titan's chest. It struck with a loud
crack, burying itself squarely in the target's sternum. The giant's breath left him in a
pained gale. The boulder he had been holding slipped from his hands and plunged into the
dust. Casting a slack-jawed look of surprise at the
Shadow Viper's
bow, he lowered his hands and closed his fingers around the shaft, narrowly missing the
ship's bowsprit as he pitched forward.

As the firing crew cranked the ballista arms back into the cocked position, Kester whooped
in joy. “That'll teach ye to raise a stone to us!” she yelled. *,

“Should Nymos drop his spell?” Agis asked.

“Not now,” came the reply. “Let 'em think it's beastheads killin' their friends, not the
Shadow Viper.”

She had hardly finished speaking before a second boulder sailed out of the dust haze and
crashed through the rigging, tearing the crow's nest from the main mast and snapping ropes
from the spreaders. Followed by the body of the screaming lookout, the rock bounced off
the keel and plunged through the main deck.

“All back!” Kester yelled.

The slaves dipped their plunging poles into the silt and began to push the
Shadow Viper
away from the shore. Kester cursed them for being too slow, then peered into the floater's
pit. “Keep us light an' lively, Agis, or we're lost!”

Two more giants came into view just beyond the bow, waist deep in silt and coming after
the ship as fast as they could plow ahead. The leader held a huge boulder in front of
himself, using it like a shield to protect himself and his companion from any more attacks.

“Tell the slaves to raise their poles,” Agis said.

Kester furrowed her heavy brow. “Why?”

“Do you know what ice is?” the noble replied, turning his concentration inward. Without
waiting for a reply, he opened his spiritual nexus wide, allowing his life-force to flow
through the dome in a torrent. The sea in his mind lightened from a turbid brown to a pale
yellow.

Agis heard Kester's voice yell, “Raise poles!”

The noble took a deep breath and visualized something he had seen only once in his life,
on a bitter cold morning during a hunting trip into the high mountains: a frozen pond. In
his mind, the yellow waters around the caravel turned the color of ivory and became as
hard as a rock. The frost spread steadily
',
outward, changing the sea into an endless white plain, as vast as the stony barrens and as
smooth as obsidian.

The noble did not stop there. He visualized a pair of outriggers stretching down from the
ship's gunnels. Where the floats should have been, there were obsidian runners, as sharp
as swords and thick enough to bear the immense weight of the
Shadow Viper.
Agis imagined these outriggers growing longer and longer, lifting the caravel's hull out
of the ice until it sat free, ready to shoot across the frozen sea at the slightest
impetus.

A boulder crashed down on the deck of the bow, drawing the noble's attention away from his
preparations. It smashed through a rack of spare harpoons and upended the foremast. As the
great staff toppled over, a giant's angry voice jeered, “You other Saram will die, too!”

“Push off, Kester!” Agis yelled. “And tell everyone to brace themselves.”

“Fast to stern!” yelled the tarek, not bothering with the warning Agis had suggested.

The slaves lowered their plunging poles and pushed. The
Shadow Viper
shot away from the giants like an arrow from a bow. The ballista crews, who had been
holding their fire for the most opportune moment, triggered their weapons. The skeins
throbbed and a pair of harpoons whooshed away. The first lance sank deep into a giant's
stomach. He bellowed, clutched the shaft, and crumpled forward into a dead heap.

The second missile gashed across the last giant's elbow, spraying a cloud of red mist high
into the air, then vanished into the dust haze. At first, Agis thought the titan had
narrowly avoided death, but the fellow's eyes glazed over and he began to stagger about as
though he were too intoxicated to stand. A moment later, his knees buckled and he fell
into the dust, his muscles twitching madly.

“Poisoned harpoons. Now ye know why we call her the
Viper,”
Kester chuckled, using the king's eye to watch the giant die. "That makes three of five.

What happened to the other two our lookout reported?"

Agis did not answer, for he had broken into a cold sweat and fallen to quivering. His
temples throbbed with a fierce, maddening pain, and his intestines burned as though he had
swallowed fire. He felt a terrible punishment rising from his gut, and the noble knew he
had overreached the limits of his endurance. He found himself leaning over to void his
stomach, still struggling to keep his hands on the floater's dome.

“What's wrong with ye, Agis?” demanded Kester. “If ye let us down now, we'll sink!”

“It's Tithian's fever!” Agis gasped, struggling to pull himself upright. “I can't-”

A tremendous boom sounded from the
Shadow Viper's
stern, bringing the caravel to an abrupt halt. Agis flew out of his seat and rolled clear
to the rear gunnel. He hit his head against a bone stanchion, then found himself lying in
a tangled mess with Kester, the helmsman, and a half-dozen other sailors. A foul smell,
almost as rank as the one he had left behind in the cockpit, filled his nostrils.

Agis looked up and found himself staring at two sets of immense blue eyes. Beneath each
pair of orbs were a craggy nose and cavernous mouth filled with broken teeth as large as
stalactites.

“They're too small to be Saram spies!” growled one giant.

The other scowled in confusion, then raised a sword-length finger to scratch between the
mats of his hair. “We'd better take them to Mag'r,” he said. “The sachem will know what
they are.”

Bathed in the full fury of the crimson sun, Tithian and Agis stood on a slate-topped table
more expansive than a Tyrian plaza. The heat shimmered off the black surface in torpid
waves, blistering their feet and scorching their lips, leaving their parched throats
bloated with thirst. Nymos lay half-conscious at the king's side, his reptilian body
unable to cool his blood in the face of the scalding temperature. At the jozhal's side
stood Kester, swaying and perilously close to collapsing herself.

The ship's crew cowered a short distance away. Despite the helmsman's efforts to keep them
quiet, the terrified slaves murmured anxiously among themselves and cast nervous glances
over their shoulders, where the end of the table overhung a sheer cliff that dropped a
thousand feet into the Sea of Silt's pearly haze.

The walls of a mountain canyon flanked the table on both sides. A pair of stone benches,
as tall and broad as Tyr's ramparts, had been carved into each of these rocky slopes. On
these benches sat a dozen giants, all with blocky, humanlike heads marked by lumpy
features and rough skin. Each wore the crude figure of his tribe's totem-a sheep, goat,
erdlu, or similar domestic animal-tattooed on his sloped brow. Most wore their hair and
beards in the long, snarled braids coveted as raw material by Balican ropemakers. Their
angry shouts rumbled back and forth over the table like thunder, so loud that Tithian
could understand only half of the words.

“We've been ignored long enough,” Tithian growled.

The king started across the broken slate toward the head of the table, where a round-faced
giant sat upon a throne of black basalt. Carved from the shoulder of a volcanic peak, the
great chair was as large as the Golden Palace itself. On the titan's clean-shaven head
rested a circlet of tree boughs woven into a brown-leaved garland of royalty, identifying
the wearer, Tithian supposed, as the monarch. The giant's eyes were witless and dull, with
puffy lids and brown irises that showed life only when they flashed in anger or malice.
From his bloated cheeks sagged great jowls, hanging well over his fleshy neck and
trembling like a loose sail whenever he bared his jagged teeth to sneer or laugh.

Tithian had taken only a half-dozen steps when Agis's fingers gouged into his arm. “What
are you doing?” the noble demanded.

“Saving us,” the king replied.

“Ye've done enough already,” hissed Kester, her eyes narrowed in anger as she joined the
pair. “We wouldn't be here if ye hadn't killed my floaters.”

“I wouldn't have had to, if you hadn't locked me in the brig-but here we are,” Tithian
hissed. He looked back to Agis and locked gazes. “I warned you it would be impossible to
recover the Dark Lens without me. Now I'll show you why.”

The king pulled free and continued forward, stopping next to a clay tankard as high as his
chest. The giant in the throne paid him no attention, but continued to bellow at a
tribesman near the middle of the table, more than thirty paces away. Tithian casually
turned his palm groundward and summoned the energy to cast a spell.

On the rocky hillsides above the giants' heads, grassy clumps of daggerblade and balls of
yellow tumblethistle began to wilt as Tithian drained the life-force from their roots.
Within an instant, every plant within the reach of a giant had turned to ash, leaving the
canyon walls as black and lifeless as the surface of the slate table.