The Seal of Karga Kul: A Dungeons & Dragons Novel (25 page)

Obek stood. “I do not wish to have that on my soul when I go to meet my gods.”

“Does anyone here believe a word he is saying?” Lucan looked from one of them to the other disbelievingly. “The Road-builder’s crew ignores you if you just keep moving? Surely we are not going to believe that just because he says it.”

Obek returned his gaze. “You want answers, friend elf, or are you content to turn your friends against me?”

“I want answers,” Biri-Daar said.

“The stories of the Road-builder’s Tomb are around for certain people to hear,” Obek said. “I have heard them. I could have told you of the crew if you had bothered to ask. I know a man who survived the trip through the Tomb and the Keep. The way he told it, the Road-builder let him live to spread the story … but took his hands so he would not loot the tomb. He told the story for his bread.”

“Where did he tell this story?” Biri-Daar asked. “Not in Karga Kul. Every story of the Road-builder that has traveled there, I have heard.”

“And I in Toradan,” Keverel chimed in.

“Different stories travel to Saak-Opole,” Obek said. “Probably all of the stories are lies, but we Northerners know better than to trust anything that comes from Avankil or Toradan, and we know that in Karga Kul is one of the thin places between our world and the Abyssal realms. Fit those two things together, and you know why I am here.”

There was a long silence. Remy did not know what to do. He was far out of his depth and had no idea how any of them could ascertain the truth of Obek’s tales, and tales about tales. A man without hands who had survived the Keep? Fanciful. But not impossible. What were they going to do? Remy waited, knowing that all he could do was follow the lead of Biri-Daar and Keverel, whose quest this was.

In the end, it was Keverel who spoke. “Obek of Saak-Opole,” he said. “We consent to have you travel with us. But know that none of us may expect to survive to see Karga Kul. Or what may happen once we are there again.”

Obek extended his right hand. “You will see,” he said. “There will come a time when you look at each other and think yourselves fools for debating over this so long.”

As they shook hands, Remy realized it was the first time he had ever touched a tiefling. He had seen them occasionally in Avankil, but the superstitions about the race died hard. Few in that city trusted tieflings—or dragonborn, for that matter, but the dragonborn were understood to be of a higher nature. Tieflings, the average citizen of the Dragondown believed, were still barely a step away from the Abyssal side of their heritage.

“So, you are Remy,” Obek said. “What is it you carry, Remy?”

Steel sang as Lucan drew, the point of his sword snapping still an inch from the hollow under Obek’s jaw. “That’s the wrong question, tiefling,” Lucan said.

“Draw back, ranger,” Obek said. He didn’t seem afraid. His hand in Remy’s was callused and powerful, but Remy felt no threat.

“Answer, then.”

“I overheard certain things at Iskar’s Landing,” Obek said. “And put them together with the rumors that rumble from the darker corners of Karga Kul and Toradan. There are those who want Philomen’s errand completed, and those who would take the cargo and send it to the bottom of the Gulf.” His eyes settled on Remy again.

“We do not know what Philomen’s errand is,” Biri-Daar pointed out. “That is why we brought Remy. We could not chance letting his package fall into the wrong hands.”

“No one seems to know what the errand is,” Obek said. “You have been in the wilderness for some time. I have been in the city. Rumors fly, and there are more plots afoot than anyone can count. There has been a great slaughter in the Monastery of the Cliff at Toradan, and demons cluster like flies in the older parts of Karga Kul. Whatever he has, it is a critical piece of a very important puzzle.”

Paelias stepped forward and pushed Lucan’s sword down. “So by gathering up our hapless Remy and his most dangerous cargo, we have put ourselves in the same danger he is in.”

“Truth.” Obek nodded. He turned back to Biri-Daar. “You are here for Moidan’s Quill, are you not?”

There was a long pause before she answered. “Yes.”

“Then you will be facing the Road-builder himself,” Obek said.

“He will not be the worst we face,” Biri-Daar said.

“He will be if he kills us all,” Kithri said. Everyone turned to look at her. “It’s true,” she said. “Since we’re all of a sudden so concerned with truth above all else.”

Biri-Daar started climbing the stairs again. She seemed stronger. They would need her at her strongest, Remy thought. All of them climbed up and out of the lower levels of the Keep, emerging to the strangest sight any of them had ever beheld.

Over their heads, the churning ribbon of the Whitefall, the black stones of the canyon that contained it, the greens and browns and yellows of the highlands stretching away to the Draco Serrata in one direction and the coastal plains in the other. A sky of every color but blue, and the sky itself, underneath and endless, darkening directly below their feet to a midnight indigo in which they could see the faintest pinpricks of stars.

“My stomach will not accept this,” Lucan said. He turned away from the vista, facing the wall of the Keep’s central tower.

The rest of them looked around the courtyard, where lay the remnants of the Keep’s first garrison and residents—their
bones, their clothing, their boots. Kithri and Remy kicked through it, wondering if there was anything of value and wondering, too, whether these long-dead soldiers and cooks would rise to attack the living intruders. But the bones stayed dead, and yielded nothing more interesting than a ring of keys. Kithri picked them up. They were iron, and without rust.

“Interesting,” Paelias said. “There’s no rhyme or reason to the way things age and decay. In the refuse pit I saw an apple core that looked as if someone had bitten into it this morning. Here we have bones as dry as any found in a thousand-year-old tomb.”

“It’s a dead man’s magic,” Lucan said. “Emphasis on the man. Humans know so little of time that they have even less grasp of it after they die.”

The eladrin and the elf ranger looked each other in the eye, something passing between them. “What?” Keverel asked.

“Lich,” Biri-Daar said. “They are deciding between them that the Road-builder has become a lich.”

“Yes,” Paelias said.

Remy looked at each member of the group in turn. They were all facing one another except him and Obek. Sidling a step closer to the tiefling, he asked quietly, “What’s a lich?”

“A human wizard of great power,” Keverel said, “who undergoes a dark ritual to survive beyond death. If the Road-builder is a lich, we’re going to need to find his phylactery, the vessel that contains his soul. We must destroy it to kill him. It will be somewhere in the Keep.”

“Perhaps, perhaps not,” Paelias interjected. “For all we know it’s back in the tomb. It could be anywhere.”

Keverel looked doubtful. “It’s a rare lich that wants its phylactery too far away. But we shall find out soon enough.”

Over at the wall, Biri-Daar looked out through an arrow slit, listening absently to the lich discussion. Remy had come to the wall as well, his head spinning with the inversion of earth and sky. The paladin’s brief season of humor seemed to have faded. Again she was her implacably determined paladin self. “I fear the worst about the quill,” she said, “and we must find it to confirm those fears or teach me that they were mistaken.”

“Biri-Daar.” She looked over at him. Remy was nervous to say what he was about to say, but it needed to be said. “Couldn’t we leave the box here?”

“We don’t know what’s inside,” she said.

“True,” he said.

“You will carry it until the gods will that you put it down,” she said. “There is no avoiding that. Accept your burden, Remy. Carry it through. The reasons will become clear to you.”

He realized then that he was more like Kithri or Lucan than Keverel or Biri-Daar. The gods were real to him but distant. He spoke the name of Pelor because it had been spoken around him in his boyhood. In contrast, Erathis and Bahamut were real and present, a constant and living influence over the cleric and the dragonborn paladin.

Looking out the window at the bottomless sky below, Biri-Daar said, “There is a long way to fall.”

“How far would you fall? Before you turned around and started to fall down. Real down.” Kithri had appeared next to them. She looked confused. “When we came down the shaft inside the Road-builder’s sarcophagus, one moment it was climbing down and the next up and down weren’t the same directions. How far away … is there a magical field?”

Paelias, also coming over to lean against the windowsill, shook his head. “I do not know. This is an ancient magic, a kind of magic few initiates in any discipline would attempt—would know how to attempt—today.”

“Back to the lich,” Biri-Daar said. “O eladrin, you manipulate the conversation with surpassing skill.”

Paelias rolled his eyes. “Simple truths are all I speak.”

“It’s time to go.” Biri-Daar shifted the straps of her shield and walked from the wall to the great double doors, bound in dwarf-forged iron, that hid the mysteries of the central keep.

The great hall of the keep was quiet and cool, the only light within cast by the gap between the open doors. Once the hall would have been alive with a fire in the hearth, music from bards and jongleurs, the echoing impacts of bootheels and the click of dogs’ nails, but all of those noises were lost to the past. What remained was silence. “Where will the Road-builder be?” Biri-Daar asked, talking to herself. She turned to Lucan and Keverel, who had entered behind her. “How many towers are there? I thought I counted four from the ground.”

“Four at the outer corners of the walls, and then there are four in more of a diamond shape inside,” Lucan answered. “I made a circuit to be sure. It looks as if there’s some kind of bridge connecting the tops of all four towers.”

“I’ll answer your question,” Obek said. “The Road-builder will be where he can see his road. That means up.” He pointed to an open stairwell at the far end of the great hall. “All the way up, is my guess.”

Up into the tower they climbed. At each landing they stopped and broke down the doors facing each other across the tattered woven rugs that were the only splash of color in the gray stone of the tower’s interior. The rooms had once, perhaps, been sentry posts or firing positions for archers, storage areas or maid’s quarters. They were small, furnished only with ruins, their slitted windows looking out into the dizzying inverted outside world. On the sixth landing, Biri-Daar held up a hand. “Kithri,” she said. “Up one floor and back, quickly.”

Kithri could move like smoke. She was back within a minute, but even that minute was long enough for the rest of them to grow edgy and over-watchful, certain that something had happened to her and that they were waiting for an onrushing doom.

Then Kithri reappeared. “Next floor opens onto a bridge,” she said. “It passes over the courtyard inside the central keep to a rooftop garden. If you go the other way on the bridge,
it connects all of the towers—just like Lucan thought from down below.”