The Seal of Karga Kul: A Dungeons & Dragons Novel (20 page)

“To me! The willow!” Biri-Daar’s voice rose over the sounds of the battle, and twining through it all, the rattle
and hiss of the yuan-ti. It was a sound nearly like speech, so that Remy’s mind looked for words in it, but never quite found them. Hypnotic and dangerous to hear, the hiss of the yuan-ti was every bit as dangerous as the poison in their fangs or the blades in their clawed hands.

Paelias sent a blast of magical energy spreading out across the surface of the water, singeing the yuan-ti and gathering them a moment to get into a defensive position. More spears arced in, but they had shields ready. Lucan even flicked one aside with his sword. Above them, the incanter whispered, its almost-words buzzing in their heads, distracting them, keeping them off balance. Remy started to get his breath back, but something was wrong and he couldn’t tell what.

Lucan looked around as they knit themselves into a circle. Blades out, backs in. “Where’s Keverel?” he shouted.

Of the cleric there was no sign.

Paelias swore and dived underwater before any of them could stop him … and with a whistle and hiss, the incanter in the tree uncoiled and dropped down, disappearing with barely a ripple after him. A moment later the water exploded into foam near the base of the tree. Simultaneously the rest of the yuan-ti reappeared, closing in with spears and nets. Kithri, already neck-deep, said, “Try not to step on me.”

“What?” Remy said.

Without repeating herself, the halfling took a deep breath and ducked under.

That left Lucan, Biri-Daar, and Remy. Three swords against two dozen yuan-ti. “We fight,” Biri-Daar said. “They
cannot gain what you have, Remy. If we must kill ten of them for each of us, or twenty, then that is what we must do.”

One of the yuan-ti, more aggressive than the rest, probed with its spear. Biri-Daar caught the barbed spearhead in one of the curls of her blade and jerked the malison off balance, close enough that both Remy and Lucan ran it through without having to take more than a step.

The others, seizing the opportunity, surged forward—but at that moment Keverel stood up out of the water, blood running from claw marks across his face and neck. In the crook of his arm dangled the lifeless form of the yuan-ti incanter. “There!” he cried, and brought his mace down on the incanter’s head. The blow forced one of its eyes out to dangle on the surface of the water. A concerted hissing whistle arose from the rest of the yuan-ti.

Paelias appeared, and he and Keverel backed toward the circle. “Where’s the halfling?” Keverel asked. He let the incanter’s body go. It sank out of sight.

“She went looking for you,” Remy said. He was still seeing double sometimes, and feeling weak in his hands and knees. “Too long ago.”

As if they were actors in a play, two of the yuan-ti between the circle of warriors and the inviting branches of the willow threw back their heads with a gargling hiss and sank into the water. Behind them, Kithri appeared, scampering up the hanging willow branches. Nearby yuan-ti stabbed their spears at her, but she quickly moved higher, out of reach. “Let’s go!” she cried. “How much of a path do you need?”

“Now you know,” Remy said.

Keeping the circle, they forced their way through a thicket of spearpoints, catching and killing any yuan-ti that drew too close, making a tortoiseshell of their shields when the yuan-ti drew back their arms to throw spears instead of thrust them. Little by little, they fought their way toward the safe haven of the tree.

“Where did you go?” Remy asked Keverel.

“Slipped,” the cleric said. “Paelias found me at the same time the incanter did. I couldn’t see, but they could. I think it bit him. Have to see to him when this is over.”

“See that you do see to me, holy man,” Paelias said. As he spoke he slowed the advance of the yuan-ti with a sheet of ice across the water. They started in breaking it apart with the butts of their spears.

It didn’t look like any of them were going to be seeing to anything when the yuan-ti were through. There were too many of them, even without the incanter. And there was nowhere to stand. Still they fought their way to the trunk of the willow and got their backs to it as the yuan-ti closed in. Kithri picked some of them off with throwing knives that snapped out of her hands faster than any of them could see in the failing light, but more arose from the water … and still more were coming through the jungle canopy.

Remy had been afraid but now was not. If he was going to die, he was going to die among comrades who had plucked him from the wastes and begun to teach him what it was to be a man, to fight for something worth fighting for. He would fight until he could fight no longer … as he had the thought he struck down into the water to his right, burying
the point of his sword in the open mouth of a malison poised to strike at his thigh.

“Up into the tree,” Biri-Daar ordered. Lucan caught a branch and swung himself up, taking a glancing slash across his leg and returning with a blow that struck out one of the yuan-ti’s slitted eyes.

A net sailed from the shadows, its weights clattering against the willow trunk and its weave tangling the sword arms of Biri-Daar and Lucan straddling the tree branch above her. More nets spun in to catch at Paelias’s limbs and web the spaces between the branches and the water. Remy cut at them, but they were coming in faster than he could handle them.

Help arrived then, from a most unexpected quarter; a blizzard of short arrows swept across the yuan-ti from an angle back in the direction of the sunken road. Whistles echoed across the water as small shapes appeared in the trees, coming from nowhere to ambush the yuan-ti. Their closing circle suddenly became a sandwiched line. Remy worked furiously to free Biri-Daar and Paelias from the net cords that tangled them. Lucan was already free. From higher in the tree, Kithri shocked them all by whistling just as their shadowy rescuers had.

“Halflings!” Kithri cried out. “The Whitefall halflings!”

They struck out from the trunk of the tree, forcing the yuan-ti back into the teeth of the halflings’ barrage. Remy flinched as the arrows of the unseen halfling archers hissed by uncomfortably close. He sunk lower in the water—and saw that the sigils on the package from Philomen were
glowing brightly through its wrappings. Anything under the water could see it.

And something did. Erupting from the swamp-bottom muck, two undead corruptions reached out for him. Their mouths fell open, spilling water and weeds and teeth. The sound they made seemed intended to be words but Remy could not parse them. He struck at one, his sword slowed at first by the water; still the blow landed and the creature’s arm snapped off just above the elbow with a crack of rotten bone. He swung around, staggering against invisible roots, and barely deflected a swiping claw. With a shock of recognition he realized what he was fighting, and just as he did Biri-Daar appeared, the righteous fires from her mouth incinerating one of the undead and her sword hacking the other back down into the muck from which it had come. “Apostate,” she said, the words smoking in the dusk. “Heretic.”

Dragonborn. They had once been dragonborn.

The yuan-ti were gone, driven back into the vine-draped darkness by the hail of halfling arrows. The halflings themselves were suddenly appearing everywhere, calling out to Kithri in a riverboat pidgin that Remy recognized but did not understand. The burning undead floated for a moment, the stinking water extinguishing the flames in puffs of loathsome steam. As it sank, Biri-Daar watched and spoke softly for only Remy to hear. “The builder of this road has much to answer for,” she said.

Their halfling rescuers were a river tribe that raided into the Lightless Marsh whenever the mood took them, it seemed. Few of them spoke a Common that Remy could understand, and the only one among the travelers who could understand their river pidgin was, of course, Kithri—and even she laughed at their odd colloquialisms. “We Blackfall halflings are a very different bunch,” she chuckled. “Intermarriage must bring some raucous festivals.”

“What are they doing this far into the marshes?” Keverel asked. “There’s nothing back here but abomination.”

“According to them, abomination and loot go together like bread and cheese,” Kithri said. She was about to go on when the leader of the halflings spoke up in Common.

“The road is as much waterway here as anything else,” the halfling said, pointing back at the gap in the trees where the submerged Crow Road led on toward Tomb Fork. “So here we are. Would you prefer to dispute further, or shall we make our exit?”

“Exit sounds good to me,” Lucan said. “This is no forest. This is a cesspit.”

The halflings had stowed their boat in the lee of a dying cypress whose girth it would have taken six men linking arms to encircle. The boat was flat-bottomed and broad-beamed, designed to take weight over distance on quiet water. Currently it was empty of cargo save for what looked like a short pyramidal stack of muddy coffins. Remy asked if that was what they were, but everyone he asked pretended not to speak Common. The boat accepted the five adventurers’ weight with no trouble and its pilot
Vokoun, at a bow tiller, waved at a half-dozen polers to get them moving.

“There are more yuan-ti than there used to be around here,” the pilot said as they poled their way through the swamp. Along the sides of the raft, archers stayed at the ready. Ahead, there was light—a patch of sky. Remy felt a weight leave his chest as he saw it. They had been closer than he’d thought; how terrible it would have been to die so near the goal … or the next stage in the goal, at any rate. “We run the tributaries all along here,” Vokoun went on, “and dip into the swamps as we hear about this or that ruin that might be worth a look. Usually whatever we find isn’t worth the fight to get it, especially the closer you get to the road. But today our shaman had dreams about the roadside near the fork, so we decided to come and see what might need our attention.” He turned to the group and winked. “Turned out to be you. Should have known you had a halfling with you. That’s probably what the shaman was really dreaming about. Half the time he’s chewed so much kaat that he can’t interpret his own mind.”

Vokoun paused for breath and Biri-Daar jumped in before he could get started again. “Can you take us as far as Iskar’s Landing?”

“Sure, that’s where we’re going anyway. From here, not much choice.” Vokoun spat overboard. Remy noted from the color that he was a bit of a kaat chewer himself. “But what do you want to go there for, if you’re headed for Karga Kul? We can get you there. For a halfling cousin—even a Blackfall cousin—it’s the least we could do.”

“We are in your debt,” Keverel said formally.

Vokoun laughed. “You sure are. But it’s a debt we’ll never collect, so why worry about it?” He spat again and looked over his shoulder at the sleeping Kithri. “She’s not doing well? She’s hurt?”

“She was badly hurt by an ogre some time back,” Keverel said. “She is healing, but more slowly than I would like. It’s the air, the bad spirits … for all I know, it’s the crows. Whatever it is, she’s not doing as well as I would have hoped. But she is tougher than the rest of us; she’ll come through.”

Vokoun clucked in his throat and said something in the river pidgin to the archers. Each of them made a similar cluck and a quick gesture over the sleeping Kithri. Biri-Daar and Keverel exchanged a glance. Remy watched, wondering if Keverel would add an Erathian blessing. When he did not, Remy then wondered whether it was because he didn’t want to offend their hosts or because he believed that, among halflings, the halflings’ beliefs carried more power. Remy knew little of gods. He had heard their names, and his oaths, when he swore them, were to Pelor, but that was because his mother had done the same. To devote one’s life to the service of a god … it was not the life Remy would choose.

And yet he would choose—was choosing, had chosen—a life of adventure, and so had Biri-Daar and Keverel. So perhaps a life lived for a god was not such a bad life after all. Remy was thinking of that when he fell asleep to the whoosh of the poles and the slap of water against the front of the halflings’ flat-bottomed boat.