Read The Seal of Karga Kul: A Dungeons & Dragons Novel Online
Authors: Alex Irvine
“Why not?” Remy asked.
“The cambions and hobgoblins scare them away. Or slaughter them,” Iriani said.
Nodding, Lucan added, “That’s if the sorrowsworn don’t get them first.”
“Sorrowsworn?” Remy had never heard the name. Or term.
“Perhaps you will have the good fortune not to find out,” Iriani said. Nobody would say anything else about it. They rode on, and camped beyond the next pass, alighting from their horses just as the last of the sun vanished behind the mountains, its dying rays slanting up into the sky.
As it turned out, they did not reach Iban Ja’s bridge until the second day after they cleaned out the lair of orcs. Biri-Daar was reluctant to push the pace while Kithri and Lucan were recovering from their wounds. When they did come to the bridge, Remy realized that everything he had heard about it—and by that time he had heard quite a lot—had utterly failed to prepare him for the reality of seeing it for himself.
They had just stopped for lunch at the head of a slot canyon through which the road angled down, following
the canyon floor. Already Remy could hear a distant roar, but despite what Biri-Daar and Lucan said, he could not believe that was the sound of a tributary river to the Blackfall, rumbling from the bottom of a gorge said to be a thousand feet deep. “What is it really?” he asked with an uncertain smile. They shook their heads and said if he didn’t believe them, he would just have to see for himself.
Which now he was.
The road ended in a tumble of scree that fell a few dozen yards to the lip of the gorge itself. Remy couldn’t see its bottom from where they stood. Around them reared up impassable walls of stone, with the narrowest of ledges on the left side of the scree.
And ahead of them, hanging impossibly in the empty air, was the Bridge of Iban Ja. Remy tried to count the stones, but could not. Some of them were larger than the house where he had last taken a meal in Avankil. Some were no larger than a man. Gathered together, they were a mosaic impression of a bridge, the gaps between them sometimes narrow enough for a halfling to tiptoe across and sometimes wide enough that no sane mortal would endeavor the jump without wings. Bits of cloth on sticks fluttered from cracks in some of the rocks, the guideposts of long-past travelers. All of the stones moved slightly, rocking in the winds that howled through the Gorge of Noon as if they floated on the surface of a gentled ocean, or a wide and flat stretch of river. Snow clung to some of them, and drifted in sculpted shapes across the flat edges of others.
“Well,” Kithri said, “now we’ve seen it. Biri-Daar, what did you say the other way across this gorge was?”
“It involves traveling fifty leagues off the road to a ford,” Biri-Daar said. “We have no time. I have crossed Iban Ja’s bridge before. It held me. It will hold you.”
“And by this point, crossing it is no longer a matter of choice,” Keverel chimed in.
“Is that so,” Kithri began. She saw Keverel pointing back up the road, turned to see what he was indicating, and saw—as Remy did at that exact moment—the band of tieflings standing in the road behind them. As they watched, the band of perhaps a dozen was fortified with ten times as many hobgoblin marauders.
Remy had seen fewer tieflings than dragonborn. The dragonborn in Avankil had their clan hall, and conducted business when they had business to conduct. The city’s tieflings, perhaps sensitive to the permanent stain on their heritage, kept to themselves when they could. When they dealt with non-tieflings, their bravado and short tempers resulted in vexed interactions. Everyone Remy had ever known, from Quayside toughs to Philomen the vizier himself, had warned him to steer clear of tieflings.
Now here he was, his back to a pathway of rocks floating in midair, facing a large number of exactly those creatures he had been told his entire life to avoid. Remy touched the box hanging at his side and wondered what it might have contributed to this turn of events. He imagined that, if they survived the next hour, Lucan and the others might have similar questions.
“It seems that some of these tieflings still believe they fight for Bael Turath,” Lucan observed.
“And that we, somehow, wear the colors of Arkhosia,” Kithri added. “Well, we do have a dragonborn with us.”
“It gets worse,” Lucan said.
“I can hardly see how,” Kithri said.
“I can,” Iriani said. “Out there on the bridge, see that? That is a cambion magus.”
Something about his tone struck up a quiet, creeping fear in Remy’s mind. Iriani, who had faced down everything they had seen thus far without batting an eye, now paused. “Devil’s offspring,” Iriani said. “You must not speak to it. These magi have the gift of deceit. They would talk any of you right off the bridge.”
“You’re assuming any of us are going on the bridge,” Kithri said. She was up on a rock at the very edge of the cliff, looking down into the gorge. “If,” she added, “you can call it a bridge. Whoever named it, I’m guessing, had never laid eyes on it.”
“I read once that Iban Ja’s ghost lives inside one of the stones,” Keverel said. “One wonders whether he would be an ally or foe.”
More tieflings and hobgoblins spilled from crevices in the canyon walls. “Time to find out,” Biri-Daar said. “Unless we’d rather fight our way through them and go back to Toradan.”
“I think I would rather do that,” Kithri said. “But I also think you were making a bad attempt at a joke.”
“And I think that your sense of humor is not nearly as
well-developed as you assume,” Biri-Daar said. “Iriani. Let us go and rid the world of a cambion.”
She leaped to the first block and crossed it in three steps. Iriani followed. As they stepped across the next gap, the hobgoblins gathered at the end of the road charged with a roar. Behind them, the tieflings cocked crossbows and fired, getting the range to the nearest part of the bridge. Kithri danced down the rock face to the edge of the scree, flicking a stream of daggers at the mass of hobgoblins before she made a running jump toward the first stone of Iban Ja’s bridge. She landed at the stone’s edge and tumbled, springing to her feet. Right behind her came Lucan, nocking and firing arrows with uncanny elf grace as he picked his way backward down the scree before firing off a last shot and turning to skip across the void to the stone.
Shoulder to shoulder, Remy and Keverel backed their way toward the edge of the cliff, skirting the rim of the scree slope to the place Kithri had selected for her leap. “My ancestors were citizens of Bael Turath,” the cleric said. “We were one of the few families who refused to take part in the diabolical pact that created these tieflings. I do believe they would hold that against me if they knew.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t tell them,” Remy said.
The leaders of the hobgoblin charge reached them, four abreast; among them came tieflings as well, bearing the cruelly carved blades of their kind. “We should go,” Keverel said. “Remy.”
“What?” Remy said, thinking the cleric was talking to him. He glanced to his left and saw that Keverel had spoken
over his mace, which glowed briefly with a pale light before Keverel deflected the first tiefling’s swing and stove in its skull with a blow of his own. At the contact, Remy felt a surge of strength; his sword grew light in his hands; he flicked aside two wild attacks, pivoting between the pair of tieflings to hamstring one and sink the blade half-deep in the other’s back.
A blow rang across the back of his helmet and Remy’s eyes swam. He heard the whistle of an arrow passing close and the gargled scream of an enemy trying to breathe into punctured lungs. The blows of Keverel’s mace, steady as the tolling of a bell, marked the time as they fought a slow retreat to the edge of the cliff, with Lucan and Kithri killing from distance while Biri-Daar and Iriani made their way ever closer to the cambion magus at the midpoint of the bridge.
“Go,” Keverel said when they reached the edge. “You first.”
Remy didn’t argue. It was in the cleric’s nature to send others first. He jumped, clearing the gap easily, and landed on his feet. Keverel was right behind him. As soon as they turned back to the cliff edge, the hobgoblins started to follow. Not all of them made the jump; some caught the edge of the stone and then slipped to fall screaming into the misty depths of the gorge. Others slipped or were pushed off the cliff face by the press of their charging comrades. The tiefling crossbowmen, abandoning the idea of Iban Ja’s bridge altogether, had started working their way up the sides of the canyon wall in search of shooting positions. One of them reached a ledge thirty feet or so above Kithri’s
former perch. It was taking aim when Lucan noticed and picked it off.
“That won’t be the last one,” he said. “We’re going to need to get out into the middle before too many more of them get up there.”
From stone to stone they leaped. The larger ones moved not at all at the impact of mortal foot, but landing on the smaller ones was precarious because they dipped and tilted from the fresh weight. Remy quickly discovered that the old bits of cloth and their stakes were a reliable guide to a safe passage using stones of sufficient size, and he thanked all of the gods—not just Pelor—for the life and work of the unknown traveler who had set them there. “Hold them here for a moment,” Keverel panted as they gained an especially large block set at an angle to the rest, so that anyone wishing to make the leap onto it had to land on one corner. Remy and Keverel waited for Kithri and Lucan to make the jump with them. Together the four held back five times that number of hobgoblins.
“Where do they all come from?” Kithri wondered aloud.
Lucan loosed an arrow at something only he had seen, back toward the lip of the gorge. “The halls of the dwarves that lived in the gorge, I’d guess. It was one of the places their ancestors lived after they drove the dwarves out.” He nocked and fired another arrow. “Cambion back there, too.”
“Still?” Kithri skipped off to one side for a better perspective.
“No, was,” Lucan said. “But don’t be surprised if there are more of them spotted in among the tieflings here.”
Behind them, Biri-Daar and Iriani were within fifty feet of the cambion magus. Landing after her most recent leap, the dragonborn faced the cambion magus and clashed her sword and shield together. “Make way and live, devil,” she said. “Or remain and die. It’s all the same to me.”
The cambion spread his arms in a welcoming gesture. “After the battle,” he said, “I will find your head at the bottom of the gorge. I will place it next to my hearth and I will make it speak those words again and again.”
Hellfire arced between the magus’s hands. Iriani landed alongside Biri-Daar on the first stone of the bridge as flames curled out of Biri-Daar’s nostrils. The thrill of battle burned through her. With an enemy before her, she knew who she was. Together they strode to the next gap and cleared it in a long step. They paused, waiting for the stone under their feet to stop rocking. Three stones remained between them and the cambion.
“Quickly there!” Lucan called over his shoulder. Crossbow bolts were beginning to fall around them as the tieflings found the range. They were forced to give up their position, which meant giving up that entire block all at once; the moment they stepped back, hobgoblins leaped across and pursued them to the next gap. It turned into a sprint punctuated by reckless leaps across greater and greater gaps. Kithri slowed their pursuers down somewhat with a scattering of caltrops in their wake. A half-dozen hobgoblins pulled up with punctured feet, bogging down those that came behind until they were shoved out of the way.
That gained them a full stone of distance, with two gaps. They turned and poured arrows, sling stones, and throwing knives into the front rank of their pursuers, slowing but not stopping them.
Then out of the caves that lined the gorge, where once the tieflings of Bael Turath had undermined the great bridge, came the black wafting shapes of sorrowsworn.
“I was afraid of this,” Iriani said. He and Biri-Daar were two jumps from the cambion magus. He had spent the trip drenching the two of them in every protective magic he could think of while they said their prayers to Corellon and Bahamut that the devil’s Abyssal magics would not overcome them.
Now the sorrowsworn—three of them, surrounded by the flickering midnight torrent of what could only be shadowravens—meant that he was going to have to divide his attentions. With a sweeping gesture, Iriani erected a magical barrier that would slow the sorrowsworn. At the same time he looked back toward where his four companions were slowing the pursuit of the tieflings. “Sorrowsworn!” he cried out. “Keverel!”
The cleric turned and saw the sorrowsworn. Immediately he dropped his shield to brandish his holy symbol of Erathis in their direction. “You slivers of death, fragments of the Shadowfell itself,” he intoned. “You haunters of battlefields, reapers of souls. You will not take those under the protection of Erathis!”
At the god’s name, the rising sorrowsworn slowed. The brilliance of Keverel’s holy light held them back … but
the shadowravens swarmed around the stones, looking for a way in.
“Biri-Daar, finish this!” the cleric called. If the sorrowsworn got close, their trickery would get inside the mind of whoever they seized on first. They fed on despair and relished the final thoughts of the suicides they created. In the midst of a battle, one moment of distraction caused by uncertainty or remembered failure could be decisive. The sorrowsworn could not approach too near, but they could reach out and find one who might be prey to their wiles.