The Obsidian Mountain Trilogy Read online

  “No you don’t. Just hold on,” Shalkan said soothingly.

  Kellen leaned forward, resting his whole weight against the unicorn’s neck and awkwardly embracing it. It was easy enough to do; the unicorn’s head hung low now, his neck parallel to the ground. Shalkan’s bristly mane dug into Kellen’s neck and chest, pressing now against bare skin, because his undertunic had been reduced to rags by the Hounds’ attacks, but Kellen barely noticed that small discomfort. Dimly, he remembered that there were things he ought to be doing, things he should be worrying about, but the pain was like a vast thick liquid that was slowly submerging him, taking away his ability to reason, to think.

  They crossed the ridge and went down into forest again. Kellen’s head ached fiercely, the pounding pain throbbing in time with his heartbeat. He groaned aloud, unable to understand why they were back among the trees—were they going back to the City? Why?—but glad to be away from the bright sunlight. Sometimes he heard Shalkan speaking to him, repeating the same words over and over with weary patience, but he was unable to rouse himself enough to make sense of what the unicorn was saying. Sometimes he tried to answer, not sure if his answers made any sense, but finally he was unable to make even that much effort, and sometime after that, Shalkan stopped talking to him.

  An eternity seemed to pass as they walked—slowly—toward the setting sun. Kellen never lost consciousness, not completely. A tiny part of his mind was always aware that he had to hold on, though at times he wasn’t sure where he was or even, near the end, what he was holding on to. When he felt himself drifting too far into unconsciousness he fought to bring himself back by forcing his broken hand into a fist, or slapping it against Shalkan’s shoulder—making the unicorn stagger—and that worked for a while.

  But at last he lost the strength for even that.

  “WE’RE across.”

  The pain ebbed, a little. Just a little. Just enough for Kellen to understand that the unicorn had stopped moving. “We’re across,” Shalkan repeated. The unicorn staggered to a stop and stood splay-legged, swaying.

  Kellen opened his eyes. Either it was dusk, or his vision was failing. He closed them again, and tried not to move.

  Something was pulling at him, dragging him from the unicorn’s back. In his mind, Kellen struggled wildly, but his body had no more left to give. He tried to see his attacker, but it was too dark, or his vision was gone at last. He felt himself being pulled upright, away from Shalkan. His feet brushed the ground and he cried out, a hoarse cawing sound, as pain lanced upward from his ankle to the crown of his head, making the world flare lightning-bright for a brief moment. Then the oblivion he had been fighting against all day swept over him in a sudden wave.

  And then nothing.

  He roused again at the touch of cool patient hands. He was lying down somewhere dark and shadowy, but he could tell nothing beyond than that. He blinked, trying to force his eyes open, but he couldn’t make them focus. All he saw was a vague shape, dark against dark.

  “Rest,” a soothing voice told him. “You’re safe here.”

  Kellen was too tired to disbelieve. He lay back, letting the hands and voice do as they wished.

  “Drink.”

  There was a cup at his lips, and Kellen was terribly thirsty. It was cool, and only when he had drained the cup did he realize that it wasn’t water, but something foul-tasting and bitter. He choked and tried to push it away, but it was too late, and he was far too weak to fight. The darkness was back, carrying Kellen away with it.

  Chapter Ten

  Hunters of the Dark

  KELLEN DREAMED, AND his dreams were anything but pleasant.

  There was no sun nor moon, but somehow he could see everything clearly.

  He looked around, and saw without surprise that he was back in the canyon, but the lush woods in the distance had been replaced by the lifeless, shattered corpses of trees, and sere grasses tufted the ground beneath them. This time, he was alone.

  When he looked up, the sky was a swirl of ugly colors, the red of drying blood, and bruise-purple, and the sickly green of an infected wound. It glowed; the strange dim light of the foxfire found in rotten stumps. The breeze carried the scent of carrion.

  The Hounds were coming; he saw them plunging among the blasted remains of the trees, hard, shining claws tearing up great clots of dead turf as they ran. Their eyes glowed, the furnace-red of embers. He could see them swarming toward him, not dozens this time, but hundreds, and as they came closer, they began to change. They sprouted long curling yellow horns, their tails became long and barbed, and their smooth granite skins bubbled and erupted until they were covered with scales. And at the last, leathery wings burst from their shoulders and unfurled in an obscene parody of butterflies emerging from a cocoon.

  With a shock, he recognized what they had become. They were Demons, just as Lycaelon had promised. He’d summoned them with the Wild Magic, and they’d come.

  They reached for him with their clawed hands, dove at him from above on their leathery wings. They were all around him now, circling around him, laughing mockingly. His sanctuary was gone.

  “Wildmage—you summoned us with your magic—Wildmage—”

  He swung at them with his club, but it changed in his hand into another Demon, writhing around and sinking its fangs into his arm.

  He flung the club away and ran.

  HE was back in the City, at Perulan’s house in the Artists’ Quarter. Kellen’s heart leaped with hope as he ran up the steps and hammered on the door. There was still time. He could warn Perulan not to leave, not to go down to the docks—

  Perulan opened the door. He was wearing his favorite red tunic, smiling as he saw it was Kellen. But as Kellen watched in horror, the cloth became tight and shiny, spread quickly all over the writer’s body and turned to scales, as Perulan became taller, fanged and clawed and winged.

  “I was waiting for you, Wildmage. Come in …”

  The Demon lunged, laughing. Kellen turned and ran.

  HE was running through the forest. It was night. Thorns and brambles ripped and tore at him, and behind him he could hear the howling of the pack as they followed. Just ahead was the canyon, if he could only reach it. But he had to have a weapon to defend himself with.

  He stopped, frantically searching, but saw nothing he could use. At last, far ahead, he spotted a branch that he could tear free. But when he reached it and pulled it away from the tree, he saw that it was old and rotting, crumbling away to splinters in his hand. Useless.

  And then the first of the Hounds was upon him, leaping onto his back, tearing at his clothes with paws that turned to taloned fingers as it giggled in his ear.

  “Wildmage—Wildmage—Wildmage—”

  HE woke up.

  He was in his own bed in his own room back in House Tavadon. It was all a dream!

  Relief so intense he nearly swooned filled him. All a dream! The discovery, the trial, the Banishment, and everything that followed, only a dream! A warning, and he’d been lucky to receive it. Now he could—

  But when he flung back the covers, he saw that the sky outside was the color of blood and darkness. Green fire laced across the sky, and by its light he could see the Hunt, racing across the garden toward his window.

  He ran for the door, but the door was gone. His father had taken the door away, because his father meant him to die here, die with the Demons he’d summoned.

  He picked up a club …

  HE was standing over a Demon. It was dead, and its blood was all over him. He wiped it away, but the harder he scrubbed at it, the more it spread, and everywhere it spread his skin turned black—black and scaled. Demonskin.

  He was a Demon, too.

  Kellen ran.

  THE Hounds pursued him, and Kellen ran. They turned into Demons, laughing at him, mocking at him, until, most horrible of all, somehow Kellen was one of them, running with the Hunt, chasing himself, howling with glee as he ran through eternal night on leathery clawed paws, hu
nting himself down. He would always run, always hunt. He would never be free …

  Tainted. Unclean. Because of the Wild Magic, just as Lycaelon had said.

  Lycaelon had been right. He’d been right about the Banishing, and he’d been right about this. Why would the High Council send so many Hounds, send not one Hunt, but many, if Lycaelon had not been telling the truth about the Demons …?

  At last Kellen spiraled down into a deeper sleep, one without dreams.

  WHAT seemed a very long time later, Kellen woke up.

  It was day. He stared incuriously at the ceiling for a long time, aware of being awake but without feeling the slightest need to do anything about it. He realized that he’d felt this way before—once, as a child, he’d caught the Spotted Sickness and run a very high fever for almost a week. When the fever had finally run its course he’d felt just like this, as if all his energy had been burned away by his body’s fires. He wasn’t sure where he was, and had no clear idea of how he’d come here, nor did it really matter to him. To think, to remember, to feel, all would take more energy than he had.

  It was a pleasant sort of lassitude, a comforting exhaustion, where the body said to the mind, you will rest because you have no choice, you will not think, nor worry, because you will not have the strength.

  He was lying on a bed in a small room with walls completely made out of unpeeled logs chinked with white river clay. He could see the ceiling—thatch over timbers—and parts of two walls. There was a window in one of the walls, its shutters thrown open to admit light and air; he had a view of green tree branches, and heard a chorus of birdsong, and the air smelled verdant and sweet. To see anything more would involve moving, and Kellen wasn’t ready to do that yet.

  He was not completely certain of how he’d gotten here. The unicorn … was Shalkan real, or was he a part of the vivid fever-dreams? Memory thrust itself into his present with the sudden unwelcome pain of a thorn in the foot. Remembering made Kellen shudder weakly—but those dreams—the Hounds, the fight—they couldn’t have been real, could they? He’d been wounded nearly to death, and nothing hurt now. He was very weak, but he wasn’t in any pain.

  But I am here, not in my room—I’ve never seen anything like this room in the City. So I was Banished, and I escaped the Hunt, so Shalkan must be real…

  Just then, he heard soft footsteps behind him, and a young woman came into his field of vision. She was carrying a small wooden tray. Her arrival jarred Kellen further out of his drifting mood of acceptance, for she looked nothing like any female he had ever seen before in his life, dressed as she was in garments that no City-dweller, even the most desperate day laborer, would have contemplated wearing for even a moment. She was … she was un-Citified. More proof, assuming Kellen had needed it, that he was actually outside the City.

  The stranger was wearing a sleeveless calf-length dress that looked as if it were made of some kind of soft golden leather, and her long dark hair was parted in the middle and pulled back into two braids wrapped and tied with leather as well, worn down as no adult woman of the City would ever consider wearing hers. She had a curious face, which reminded him of a cat; perhaps because it was shaped like an inverted triangle, perhaps because her expression was very certain, and very self-composed. He’d never seen a female who had such an air of self-confidence about her—but then as a member of the Mageborn aristocracy, Kellen hadn’t met very many females at all. Her soft violet eyes, which seemed large for her face, were fringed by the longest darkest lashes Kellen had ever seen—and suddenly he was positive, not only that Shalkan was real, but that the vow of chastity and celibacy that he had so recklessly sworn to gain the unicorn’s aid was going to be more difficult to keep than he’d ever actually imagined.

  His body’s response surprised him—surely he was far too weak and sick to be thinking of something like that at a time like this?

  All this went through his mind in the moment it took for her to turn her gaze on him and smile.

  “Oh, good, you’re awake. I was starting to worry; it’s been more than a sennight,” she said. Her voice was low and friendly, and strangely familiar—where could he have heard it before?—and her smile warmed her eyes. “Do you think you can sit up?”

  Without waiting for an answer, she set the wooden tray on a table beside the bed and moved toward Kellen. Slipping one arm behind his shoulders, she pulled him into an upright position with easy strength. As the bedcovers—a thin wool blanket covered by several supple, beautifully tanned animal skins with the hair still on—slipped away, Kellen realized he wasn’t wearing a single thing beneath them.

  Reflexively, he grabbed for the blanket, pulling it up around his waist, and gazed at his hands and arms in puzzlement.

  There were no wounds. No bites, no bruises, not even any of the scratches he’d gotten riding Shalkan through all those thornbushes on their flight from the City before the fight with the stone Hounds. He didn’t even see the bruises from the way the stone golems had handled him, dragging him out of the Council chamber.

  For a moment reality slid dizzyingly around Kellen. Without the proof of his injuries to anchor him, he wasn’t sure what to believe. What was real, and what was just a fever dream?

  But Shalkan was real. He was sure of it. And the City had sent an Outlaw Hunt to kill him and anyone who dared to help him escape the City lands—the Hounds. He remembered almost everything now. But where were the bites, the wounds—the proof of his flight? He didn’t even have scars.

  “Eat now, then we’ll talk,” the woman said firmly, seeing his confusion. “You’ve been asleep for a long time.”

  But not long enough to heal without scars, Kellen thought with a faint pang of fear.

  The strange woman sat down on the edge of the bed and helped him feed himself. He was weaker than he’d expected to be, and clumsy; she had to guide his fingers around the wooden mug and help him hold it to his lips, and he could not manage the bowl and spoon at all for very long. The strength just went out of his arm and hand, and his hand shook so much he had to give up on the notion of doing without help. She just waited while he came to that conclusion by himself, then took up the spoon and continued where he had left off.

  Defeated, he lay back and let her feed him, but when he had finished the meat broth and the mug of herb tea with honey, he felt much stronger. Strong enough to worry about where Shalkan was, and about what came next, at any rate. He was free of the City, and now he had to figure out what to do next. In fact, he had his entire life to figure out now, and the prospect was daunting.

  Free. In all his seventeen years of life, Kellen had never imagined the word could have such a bitter taste. For the rest of his life he was going to have to live with the consequences of a decision made in the flush of youthful bravado and adolescent anger. He was an Outlaw—barring a miracle, he would never see Armethalieh or his father again. And now that he was in this position, he realized that he missed the City more than he’d ever imagined he could.

  Or—did he really miss the City, or only the comforts and certainty it represented? It was not going to be an easy thing to make his way alone outside the City walls.

  For one thing, how was he going to live out here? Unless something extraordinary happened, and this young woman decided to allow him to live with her, he was completely without resources now. He didn’t even have clothing at this point! No food, no clothing, no place to live, and no idea how he was to get any of those things. He knew nothing about farming, hunting—

  Maybe Shalkan could help him. If Shalkan was all right—if the unicorn wasn’t in worse shape than he had been … Kellen had a vague recollection of seeing Shalkan’s white fur saturated with blood; it couldn’t have been the Hounds’, and he couldn’t remember if it was his …

  “Your friend is fine,” the woman said, as if she could guess the direction of at least some of his thoughts. “And he was in much better shape to begin with than you were when you arrived. The unicorn says that your name is Kellen
, you’re a Wildmage, and that you fight remarkably well, but he doesn’t know much else. Now, since all I know about you is that you escaped the City and the Outlaw Hunt, and that you arrived on my doorstep in a rather pitiable condition, let’s begin at the beginning. Tell me, Outlaw, what’s your full name?”

  He didn’t really want to tell her his life story, but—well—she’d more or less earned some answers by taking him in and caring for him without knowing anything about him.

  “Kellen … Tavadon,” he admitted reluctantly.

  His rescuer looked startled, as if she almost suspected him of playing some kind of a trick on her. Her eyes widened, then narrowed, and her jawline tensed.

  “Son of Lycaelon Tavadon?” she asked sharply. “The Arch-Mage of Armethalieh?”

  “Yes …” Kellen admitted warily. It suddenly occurred to him that if the City enforced its rules by such drastic means as the Outlaw Hunt within its borders, it might have enemies outside them.

  She knows Father’s name. What has he done to her, to her people? Is she going to hate me, because Lycaelon’s my father? Or demand some sort of reparation from me? Or throw me back to the Hunt?

  “I’m afraid so. Though I’m not exactly in good odor with him, since he’s the one who Banished me.”

  The woman smiled sardonically, looking enormously like Lycaelon all of a sudden.

  “A Tavadon—and an Outlaw to boot. Well, I guess Mother’s Mountain blood runs true, little brother.”

  Of all the responses Kellen had tried to anticipate, this was not one that had even crossed the threshold of his mind. It was his turn to be startled, and for a moment he wasn’t certain he’d heard her correctly.

  “Brother?” Kellen said blankly.

  “Didn’t our loving father tell you?” the woman asked. “That you had an evil sister, and that you’d turned out just like her? I would have thought he wouldn’t be able to resist casting that in your face, if he was Banishing you …”