Dark Sun: Prism Pentad 4 - Obsidian Oracle (28 page)

“No. We have learned that there are worse evils than Borys,” objected Jo'orsh. “Otherwise,
we would not have forsaken our pledge to kill him, nor condemned ourselves to this.” He
ran the gnarled stump of an arm down his skeletal body.

If the Dragon dies, Rajaat will be freed,
Sa'ram added.
He'll resume his wars on the green races and won't stop until all of them have
perished. We cannot condemn all the races of Athas to death to avenge the dwarves on
Borys, or even to spare ourselves an eternity of suffering.

“That's why we must all do as the king commands. Rkard has returned to defend not only the
dwarves of Kemalok, but all the races of Athas as well,” Tithian argued, bringing all his
persuasive talents to bear-even though he cared little for the causes he espoused so
eloquently. “The Dragon and his champions have turned the land into a wasteland. If we
don't kill Borys, there'll be nothing left for the dwarves or any other race to inhabit.”

“And what of Rajaat?” demanded Jo'orsh. “It will do no good to kill Borys if Rajaat
destroys the world.”

“We'll find a better way to take care of Rajaat. But even if we cannot, what difference
will keeping him locked away make if Borys destroys the world?” Tithian asked. “For too
long, we've tried to trade one evil for the other. We must eliminate them both, or Athas
will perish as surely as if we had let them both roam free.”

His words have the ring of wisdom, Jo'orsh,
observed Sa'ram.

“He has never fought Rajaat,” countered Jo'orsh. “He did not see the massacres of the
Green Age.”

“But your king did. He's the one who sent me to take over for you here,” Tithian
countered. When the two spirits still seemed unconvinced, he added, “On the way to
Kemalok, you'll see what has become of Athas. After your journey, you won't think the
world is a better place with Borys free.”

“And if we do?” asked Jo'orsh.

“Then all you have to do to save the Dragon is kill one child and return to the Oracle.
But I'm sure you'll see that your king is right, or I would never suggest such a thing to
you,” Tithian said. In truth, it did not matter to him whether the spirits protected
Neeva's child or killed the young mul, so long as they left Tithian alone with the Dark
Lens. “Now go! You have no choice, for your king has summoned you. You must keep the
pledges you made when you were alive!”

He's right, Jo'orsh,
said Sa'ram.
We must see what has
become of the world. It may be that we've done more harm than good.

“And it may be that we're about to,” Jo'orsh responded. “But we shall see.” The two
spirits started up toward the surface, Ba'ram carrying the belt and Jo'orsh the crown.
Tithian watched them for a short time, then started down the tunnel. With the two spirits
gone, all that separated him from the lens were a few yards of darkness.

“Forget Mag'r! You're going to lose the Oracle to Tithian!” said Agis.

“The Oracle can take care of itself,” grunted Nal, paying little heed to his prisoner.

Agis sat in the crook of the bawan's elbow, where he had been trapped since being
delivered by the Poison Pack. The noble and his beasthead captor were peering out from
behind a jagged merlon, watching Joorsh warriors wade back and forth through the Bay of
Woe. The giants were filling the sails of Balican schooners with boulders from Lybdos's
rocky shores, then slinging the makeshift sacks over their shoulders and returning to
their battle posts in the silt to hurl the stones at the Saram castle.

As Agis and Nal watched, a group of Joorsh launched a flurry of boulders in their
direction. A half-dozen smashed into the ramparts with thunderous booms, shaking the
castle to its foundations and dislodging jagged chunks of wall. One missile knocked a
hanging turret from its buttress, plunging the screaming beasthead inside to his death.
Two more struck Saram warriors in the heads, drawing geysers of hot blood and stunned
death cries. Another stone shattered the merlon behind which Nal stood, sending a painful
crash through Agis's ears and gashing his face with jagged shards of stone.

“It seems the battle is going against your tribe,” Agis observed, using his sleeve to wipe
the blood from his face.

“I didn't have you removed from the crystal pit because I value your observations,”
replied the bawan.

Nal moved past several of his own stone-hurlers to find a new position on the wall. He
stopped behind a free merlon and peered out over the isthmus connecting Castle Feral's
peninsula to the forests of Lybdos. At the far end of the causeway, Sachem Mag'r stood on
the island's shore, as tall as the thorny trees behind him and twice as round. He was
flanked by thirty of his largest warriors, all with kank-shell bucklers strapped to their
forearms and spiked, schooner-mast war clubs resting over their shoulders. In front of
this company stood twelve more warriors, six to each side of the causeway and waist-deep
in dust. Between them, the two lines held a massive battering ram, capped with a
wedge-shaped head of granite. To deflect boulders dropped on them from the castle walls,
these giants wore crude, mekillot-bone armor over their shoulders and heads.

To one side of the isthmus sat the
Shadow Viper,
half-submerged in the silt bay and turned so that its bow ballistae and the port catapults
could fire at the castle. Behind the ship stood a pair of Joorsh warriors, using mekillot
shells to shield the decks from Saram boulders and shouting commands at the weapon crews.

The catapults and ballistae clattered, launching two massive spears and a volley of
stones. Nal ducked as the boulders sailed over the walls, but the crow-headed warrior at
the next merlon was not so quick. The barbed tip of a harpoon came shooting out of his
neck, scattering blood-soaked feathers in all directions. A garbled cackle rattling from
his beak, he fell at his bawan's side.

Nal put a foot on the warrior's chest to hold him still. Cradling Agis in one arm, the
bawan grabbed the base of the spear with his free hand.

“As bad as this looks, the Joorsh are the least of your worries,” Agis said, cringing as
the bawan snapped the shaft off. “You've got to do something about Tithian, or neither you
or Mag'r will have the Oracle when the battle is over.”

“Even if the Oracle did not have its own defenses, it is protected,” the bawan said. He
rolled the wounded warrior over, grabbing the spear just behind its barbed head. "A Poison
Pack sentry remains with if

“One sentry!” Agis objected, realizing that Nal had just inadvertently revealed the
location of the lens. When the noble had been plucked from the crystal pit, the bat-headed
Saram who had been sent to fetch him had spoken of being summoned from the Mica Yard. “A
single guard won't stop Tithian.”

“A member of the Poison Pack is no ordinary guard,” Nal responded, slowly pulling the
shaft through the crow-head's throat.

Tithian is no ordinary man,“ Agis replied. ”If you won't kill him yourself, let me do it
for you."

“What kind of fool do you take me for?” scoffed the bawan. The broken end of the harpoon
emerged from the wound. “Do you expect me to believe you'd kill your companion on my
behalf?”

“Not on your behalf,” replied Agis. “On my own. Tithian betrayed me.”

“You're wasting your breath,” said Nal. “I won't fall for your ruse.”

“It's no ruse,” Agis insisted. “Tithian and I were never partners. We each wanted the
Oracle for our own reasons.”

“And I suppose you no longer want it?” mocked Nal. He tossed aside the broken spear.
“You've suddenly decided that killing Tithian is more important than the Dark Lens?”

“You were inside Tithian's head!” Agis objected, avoiding a direct answer to the question.
“You know what he'll do if he gets the Oracle!”

The bawan nodded. “That's true. I also know what he intends for you.” He ripped the
crow-head's breech-doth off the warrior's loins, then stuffed the filthy rag into the
gaping wound to stanch the bleeding. “If you know as well, you could be telling the truth.”

“Let me go after him,” Agis pressed.

Before replying, Nal rose back to his feet, pulling the wounded warrior along with him.
“Back to your post!”

The crow-head obeyed, looking dizzy and weak. His feathery ears twitching in irritation,
Nal turned his full attention to Agis. “No. However much you despise Tithian, you still
want the Oracle for yourself,” he said. “Besides, you must repay me for all the trouble
you caused by freeing the Castoffs.”

“How?” Agis asked.

Nal pointed across the causeway to where Mag'r stood with his bodyguards.

“Surely, you don't think I can kill the sachem single-handedly?” Agis asked.

“No, but if Mag'r has not yet assaulted the gate, it's because he still hopes you'll open
it. I want you to oblige him,” said the bawan. “The Poison Pack will take care of the
rest.”

The bawan pointed toward the gate area. The company of fanged warriors that had fetched
Agis from the crystal pit now stood waiting on the cliff overlooking the entry yard. In
addition to their steel-tipped lances, each member of the pack had an entire cartload of
boulders sitting nearby.

“It seems a risky plan,” Agis observed. “Once the gates are open-”

“I'll kill Mag'r, and that will end the battle-if not the war,” Nal interrupted. “The
Joorsh chiefs will fall to bickering over the next sachem. By the time they sort the
matter out, my reinforcements will arrive from the outer islands to replace our losses
against the Balkan fleet-and I will have returned the Cast-offs to their pit.”

After he spoke these last words, he snapped his beak closed with an angry clack and
lowered his head toward Agis. For a moment, the noble feared that Nal would attack him,
then the bawan said, 'It's the least you can do to repay me for what you have done."

“You brought this upon yourself when you refused to give the Oracle to the Joorsh,” Agis
replied. “And I don't see that you need me to open the gates.”

“Mag'r is no fool,” the bawan replied. “If he doesn't see you, he'll smell a trap and stay
away.”

Agis sighed. “If I do this, will you at least send a detail of your own warriors to guard
the lens? Perhaps
they'll
even be lucky enough to kill Tithian.”

“And where am I supposed to get these warriors?” Nal demanded, waving his hand around the
citadel.

The Castoffs that you unleashed have left me with nothing to defend the walls. The Joorsh
could break through in a dozen places."

What the bawan said was true. There were several gaps along the walls, with unconscious
Saram slumped down behind the merlons, draped over rock carts, and even sprawled on the
staircases. More than a dozen of the warriors who remained standing had been beset by
Castoffs, and were tearing the hide from their own faces or banging their heads into the
walls.

“If I didn't need you to lure Mag'r into my trap, I would kill you now for the trouble you
have caused,” said Nal, one golden eye fixed on a flock of nearby Castoffs.

“What you've done to them is wrong,” said Agis. “I'm glad they're free.”

“Don't be too glad,” said Nal. “One of the bawan's duties is to protect his tribe from the
Castoffs. Once this battle is over and I have time to gather them up, I'll make their
return to the pit as unpleasant for them as the Castoffs are making my warrior's lives
right now.”

With that, the bawan climbed down from the wall. He took Agis to the path leading down
into the gate-yard, stopping beside the huge stone ball at the top of the path. “After you
open the gates, make sure that the Joorsh see you,” said Nal. - Agis eyed the scene below.
The path had been carved into the cliff with a high lip on its outer side, so that it
formed a deep channel down which the stone ball would roll. At the bottom of the steep
slope, this gutter curved gently to the right and opened into the entry yard, directly
across from the gates themselves.

Between the trench-path and the gates sat the small courtyard where most of the killing
would take place. It was surrounded on all sides by the high walls of the outer curtain,
the two gate towers, and the cliff upon which the noble and Bawan Nal now stood. A dozen
ordinary Saram warriors crouched atop the gate towers, boulders heaped at their sides. The
Poison Patrol manned the clifftop, ready to charge down the path as soon as they threw
their cartloads of boulders down into the yard. Only the walls of the outer curtain were
lightly manned, for any warriors there would be visible on the shores of Lybdos, and might
cause Mag'r to grow suspicious of a trap.

In the courtyard itself, Nal had laid a pair of dead beastheads near the exit, where they
would be seen by anyone entering the castle. Their purpose, Agis assumed, was to reassure
the Joorsh that the gates had not been opened without a fight. The noble was about to
comment on the bawan's preparations when he noticed that the stonework around the gate was
not up to the quality of the rest of the castle. The blocks were much smaller and fitted
together less tightly, as if it had been necessary to rebuild the entryway and the task
had been done in a hurry.

“You intend to capture Mag'r in the yard?” Agis asked.

“How perceptive,” Nal replied sarcastically.

“Then there's a flaw in your plan,” the noble said, eyeing the huge stone at his side.
“That ball will never stop when it hits the gateway. It'll crash through the front wall
like paper.”

“Probably,” replied the bawan. “But what makes you think I intend to loose the ball?”

“How else can you seal the gate after I open it?”

Nal put the noble down and gestured for him to descend the path. “You shall see soon
enough,” he said. “Now go.”

Agis started down the trench path at a run, keeping his eyes fixed on the broken ground
beneath his feet. When he had guided the dead bear up the lane, the surface had not seemed
quite so uneven, perhaps because of the great size of the beast's paws. To Agis's feet,
however, the loose rocks and enormous potholes were sizable obstacles, and he had to pick
his footing carefully. As he ran, Joorsh boulders continued to pound the gate area,
filling the pit with deafening booms and rumbles.