The Seal of Karga Kul: A Dungeons & Dragons Novel (16 page)

In the years before Arkhosia and Bael Turath put their stamp on the world, a great and now forgotten empire arose in
the highlands between the Blackfall and Whitefall rivers. So long ago did it rise and fall that even most of its ruins are destroyed and gone, and its languages and arts, its deeds both villainous and glorious, are lost. All that remains of this vanished empire is the Crow Road.

Ancient records of Bael Turath and Arkhosia speak of it and describe it exactly as it appears to the adventurer of today: a road whose stones no frost can heave, which even buried under mudslides centuries old looks as if it was built yesterday when dug out again. It is a road to outlast the ages.

And on it the traveler will experience things that exist on no other road.

The story is that the nameless empire contained a great builder, who wished not only to build roads across the face of the mortal world, but between the planes and other realms as well. The folklore of this people—this is one of very few things known about them—held that crows and ravens had commerce with all of the realms. Therefore, after the builder surveyed his route but before he lay the first stone, he brewed a great enchantment using all of the magical might his empire’s wizards could muster … and he taught the crows how to understand human speech.

Then he learned their secrets. “I have given you a gift, crows,” he said. “Now in return you may tell me the secret of your ability to perceive and travel to all realms, whether astral or abyssal, elemental or fey.”

But the crows were crows, and would not tell. Have you ever tried to convince a crow to do anything? To this day,
when you speak in the vicinity of a crow, or a raven, be careful. Say only what you would not fear to have repeated in front of your enemies.

Great grew the builder’s fury. Eventually he reasoned that if he could not get the answers from the crows while they were alive, he would learn it from what happened when they were dead. A bounty went out through the empire, and dead crows began arriving at the castle where the builder had his plans. At first they arrived a few at a time, brought by the bored children of local farmers. Then, when word spread that the builder paid the bounty he promised, crows started to arrive by the saddlebag-full, and then in sacks large enough that mules brought them to the builder’s door. He paid, and paid, and paid. Soon the crows had learned to stay away, but they had also learned why, and from that moment forward the crows were sworn enemies of the builder and of his road.

He had one more card yet to play, however. When he brought his crews out to the edge of the elves’ dark wood and dug the first stretch of the road’s bed, he laid the body of a crow under every tenth stone.

Now the crows hated the road and the builder, but the road was also a crows’ burial ground and they flocked to it because—though they might be larcenous, fickle, and cruel—crows honor their dead. The road stretched mile after mile, and every man or dwarf, halfling or elf—every mortal being that died building the road was buried under its stones. Walking it, the builder decreed, would be a voyage that paralleled the path between worlds.

Of course he was quite mad by this time, and grew madder as the road went on. The builder ordered exotic beasts of the Shadowfell and Elemental Chaos, the Feywild and the Abyss, all of the planes. He ordered them brought to the road and there he killed them and buried them beneath its freshly laid stones. And each of those deaths permeated the stones, and brought a bit of the other realms to the road.

Over it all watched the crows, since the builder had so many that he still buried one under every tenth stone.

At last the road reached its juncture with an even older road that led along the path of the Whitefall. He could have stopped there, but the builder had dead crows yet, and a few of the strangest unnameable creatures the magical hunters of other planes could bring him. He built onward, and buried his last crow under the final stone of the road, at the edge of a bluff overlooking a bend in the Whitefall. There he thought he could rest, and there he built himself a keep that would be his last building, where he could grow old looking out over the road he had built.

“So that’s the Inverted Keep, isn’t it?” Remy asked.

Lucan nodded. “That’s what the story says.”

“How did it get inverted? What happened to the builder?”

“Those are other stories,” Lucan said. “I’m tired of telling stories. Let’s ride, and let’s look out for what the crows get up to along this road.”

“Sounds like the crows are the least of our problems,” Kithri said.

“Some of them are shadowravens,” Lucan said.

Kithri nodded. “See?”

“But there are no sorrowsworn around because no great battle has ever been fought on the Crow Road. No general has ever kept an army together along its path.”

“Why would a general have wanted to come this way?” Biri-Daar wondered. “Between here and Karga Kul there is nothing.”

Lucan took a drink to wet his throat after the story. When he was done he said, “Who other than generals knows why generals do anything?”

Keverel leaned over toward Remy. “This, you see, is why none of us became soldiers.”

For the rest of the day they rode. Remy turned over in his mind the idea that Biri-Daar was a descendant of the Knights of Kul. How was it possible to know things like that? Iban Ja was a name in a story. Even the archivists of Arkhosia were unsure when he had lived, which meant they were unsure when the bridge had fallen.

What history might lie behind Keverel, or Kithri?

What
, Remy wondered,
might lie behind me?

He knew little about his own family. His mother Melendra had died five years before, when he was fourteen and by the laws of Avankil a man. Since then he had slept at the docks, usually on ships that had been abandoned or whose captains had died onshore. It took the Avankil authorities quite a while to track down and auction off
those ships. In the meantime they served very well as a protected place to sleep for the urchin youth of the city. Remy had avoided the gangs by spending just enough time at the keep for the gang leaders not to trust him, but also to decide not to kill him … which he could have made difficult because a year after his mother died was when he had bought his first sword.

Of his father he knew nothing but stories. His mother had told him that his father was a sailor on one of the fast ships that escorted valuable cargoes on the cross-Gulf run between Furia and Saak-Opole. This route often ran afoul of pirates at the Kraken’s Gate, part of the archipelago at the mouth of the Dragondown Gulf. To hear Remy’s mother tell it, his father had fought through the pirates a dozen times and more, and had seen things in the waters beyond the Kraken’s Gate that he lacked the words to describe. Physically, she said, Remy resembled his father more and more as he grew older. He wondered what she would say now that he was grown. He wondered whether his father was alive, squinting into this same sunset from the deck of a ship in the Gulf—or dead, his bones long since sunk into the seabottom muck far away from the light, deeper than even the sahuagin will venture …

“Remy.”

He looked up into the concerned face of Lucan. “You were far away for a minute there,” Lucan said.

“History,” Remy said. “I was thinking about history.”

Lucan whistled. In the trees, crows ruffled their feathers at the sound. “They will talk to me a little because I know
some of their language,” he said. “Crows don’t like it when you assume that they will learn your speech and you don’t have to learn theirs.”

“Is that right,” Remy said. He wasn’t sure whether Lucan was joking or not.

Lucan raised his arm and whistled a complicated pattern. Out of the setting sun fell a crow. It landed on his forearm and cocked its head at him. “See?” he said to Remy.

“I see you can call it,” Remy said. “I haven’t seen that it can talk.”

“Awk,” the crow said. “Talk.”

Lucan clucked at it. “Slow, slow. No need to rush.” He looked up at Remy. “It has been a very long time since they received their gift. Most of them never use it and it comes back slowly when they try.”

“Time,” the crow said.

With a wink at Remy, Lucan said, “Time, right. Plenty of time.”

“No time,” the crow said.

“Why not?” Remy asked it.

“No time to talk,” the crow said. It flapped over to Remy and landed on his shoulder. Leaning in close to his ear, it said, “Found you. They found you. Time to watch you die.”

He would learn later that some of those who had died building the Crow Road returned as spectral undead, yearning for their bodies to live again—or, failing that, to at least be buried with the ceremonies of their gods. There
were undead in Avankil, of course. Bodies rose from the slack waters under the piers, or dug their way out of the rubbish heaps where murderers disposed of their victims. Ghosts haunted the lower corridors of the keep and the places near the walls where the specters of soldiers remembered invaders long since gone to their own rewards. The Crow Road, though, built on death, gave rise to undeath with every step.

They turned after the crow spoke and saw behind them the insubstantial shapes of wraiths and specters. They did not pursue; they shepherded. “We’re being walked ahead to meet something,” Paelias said. “I wonder what.”

“I’d rather not find out,” Kithri said. She rubbed at her forehead over her right eye. Remy had noticed her making that gesture frequently these past few days. He wondered if she was still suffering the effects of the ogre’s kick back in the orc lair. Lucan seemed to have recovered, but the Eye of Gruumsh’s spear point had passed only through meat; his joint and bones were unhurt, and Keverel had sewn his wounds up so well that Lucan was already complaining that the scars would be too small to impress the barmaids of Karga Kul.

The crow still sat on Remy’s shoulder. “Ever get the feeling that you had a crow on your shoulder so the enemy knows who to aim at?” Paelias said loudly.

Feathers rustled in the surrounding trees, and out of the deepening darkness came more crows, to festoon the party and the horses. “Wrong again,” croaked the crow on Remy’s shoulder. They kept a stead pace, moving forward, always
forward, even though the time for camp had long since come. Remy’s eyes jittered back and forth from fatigue. He couldn’t focus on anything for long.

“Found me, you said,” he said to the crow.

“Awk,” the crow said. “Aye.”

“How come they don’t attack, then?”

“Because of us,” the crow said. Its voice grew clearer the more it was used.

“How droll,” Lucan said. “It tells us it’s time to watch us die, then says that we are not dying because of it.”

“Perhaps you have failed to attune yourself to the crow sense of humor,” said Biri-Daar. She was riding out in front of the rest of them, scouting to make sure the mass of undead behind them had not somehow raised reinforcements ahead.

“Are you suggesting that a crow has more of a sense of humor than I do?” Lucan said.

“If she wasn’t, I will,” Kithri said.

The crow on Remy’s shoulder followed this back-and-forth with cocked head. “Awk,” it said at the end.

“Really, they’re not attacking us because of you?” Remy asked it.

“Really.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“The elf, awk,” the crow said. “Speaks our language. Few Tenfingers care. Awk.”

“Who would like to apologize first?” Lucan said smugly.

“What I want to know,” Kithri said, “is why the wraiths back there are afraid of a bunch of crows.”

Paelias chuckled. “This is the Crow Road, isn’t it?”

The crows on their shoulders and on the pommels of their saddles
awk
ed.