by Alex Irvine
But Remy could spare little attention for their duel. He pressed forward, striking at the Road-builder but finding his blows deflected by the power of his necromantic aura. It clouded the vision and the mind; only Keverel’s incantations kept them from succumbing completely. One of Lucan’s arrows struck true, opening a crack in the Road-builder’s skull. He answered with a simple gesture, two forked fingers pointed like a snake’s tongue—but something black burst silently, momentarily obscuring both Lucan and Kithri.
When it cleared, both of them lay still. There came a brief hush over the garden, a spot in time between blows and parries, shouting and the crackle of magical discharge. Into the silence came the Road-builder’s voice.
“Do you feel it, Remy? What you’ve brought me? Or should I say—what brought you?”
What brought me? Remy paused. The hesitation cost him as one of the vestiges got too close. Remy started to feel thick, started to think he heard the voices of the flowers beckoning him closer … they were spirits. They had not just grown from dead men, they were the spirits of the dead.
“Remy!”
Light blazed through the curtain falling over him—the light of Erathis, as Keverel gave himself up to the power of the god working through him. Karga Kul was Erathis’s city, one epitome of the law and progress that pleased the god. If the quill would save Karga Kul, Erathis would work through Keverel to bring it there.
The vestiges began to fall back, torn to pieces by the force of the light from Keverel’s talisman. Moula fell back before a fresh sustained attack, pivoting around and retreating in the direction of the bridge over which the party had first come to the garden. Biri-Daar pressed him; she grew more resolute and he more desperate, and at the same moment they opened their mouths and engulfed each other in flame.
Fire of another sort, black and curling and cold, spewed from the Road-builder. It brought forth a fresh cluster of vestiges. Obek struck again and again at the lich, and Remy did too, reinvigorated by the blazing Erathian light. He felt his sword bite into the Road-builder’s bones. Paelias, given a brief respite by the momentary destruction of the vestiges, returned to the battle with a fury. All of the undead plants surrounding the Road-builder uncoiled and sprouted into sinewy vines, spiked with long black thorns. Some of them caught at the lich’s robe, some his legs, some snaked up his arms. The Road-builder tore some of them free; others died the moment they came within the reach of his aura. But Paelias grew more vines, the power of the Feywild momentarily overpowering the lich’s compact with Abyssal forces. Slowly the Road-builder was overcome; slowly the sword strokes of Remy and Obek began to tell.
All of them gained strength from Biri-Daar, her paladin’s charisma bathing them in its psychic glow. With every strike at Moula, she grew stronger. Light flared more and more brightly from her sword. Behind Moula, Lucan began to stir. He got to his knees before the dragonborn traitor stumbled over him and went down, knocking Lucan down again as well. Moula landed heavily on Kithri. Lucan, long daggers in both hands, sank one of them to the hilt in a gap in Moula’s armor, behind his left shoulder. The dragonborn roared in his agony; Biri-Daar bore down and split his shield in two, severing his shield arm above the wrist.
The remaining vestiges, at a command from the Road-builder, raised their spectral arms. In the space above the Road-builder’s head, a sphere of deepest empty black appeared. The incongruity of it, seen against the pleasing highland prospect that was their sky, was suddenly to Remy almost as horrible as the necromantic sorcery of the orb itself. He thrust, and his blade jammed in the hinge of the lich’s jaw. Splinters of bone flew away from the impact as the necrotic orb hovered over toward Lucan and Biri-Daar. Paelias’s vines caught one of the Road-builder’s arms and pulled it off with a grinding crack. The Road-builder was speaking, the language long dead and sounding like death itself in Remy’s ears. Dying, Moula got to his feet one last time, knocking Lucan aside. Biri-Daar swung and he raised his maimed arm, sacrificing the rest of it to deflect the stroke.
Kithri stirred. Her face was pale, her eyes struggling to focus. One of her hands felt blindly along the gravel, looking for her sling or perhaps another weapon. Moula sank back, waving the stump of his arm trying to get his balance. Biri-Daar broke his collarbone and brought a freshet of blood from his chest with her next blow. He swung, forcing her back … and then he looked at her, the traitor regarding the avenging paladin. Moula looked at her and a sick smile spread across his face.
He turned away from her and with the last decisive action of his life, Moula ran Kithri through, driving his blade straight down into the gravel.
Biri-Daar, a split second later, struck off Moula’s head. At that exact moment, Obek and Remy hacked the unlife from the Road-builder’s body.
A split second after that, the necrotic orb fell among them and detonated in a soundless explosion that was the most violent thing Remy had ever felt.
The vines died and their creator was flung back through the greenhouse wall in a shower of glass. Lucan and Biri-Daar collapsed, and Remy toppled over backward with the bones of the Road-builder falling around him. He couldn’t focus. He couldn’t breathe. His heart skipped, stopped, then raced. Obek was driven to his knees, eyes squeezed shut against the terror that necromancy held for the renegade tiefling.
And Kithri spun away, still impaled by Moula’s sword, her body turning over and over as it fell past the Keep’s outer walls up into the sky. The last thing Remy saw was Keverel reaching vainly after her.
Consciousness slowly returned. Paelias came out of the greenhouse, bleeding from a number of superficial cuts. Lucan, looking out over the parapet, wept. Obek poked through the Road-builder’s remains with the point of his sword while Biri-Daar and Keverel headed straight for the stone structure at the end of the greenhouse. “Everyone up,” Biri-Daar commanded. “We have yet to finish this.”
“Finish this?” Obek said. “What’s to finish? The Road-builder is dead. The dragonborn is dead. Let’s get the quill and head for Karga Kul.”
“Phylactery,” Keverel said.
Paelias nodded. “Any guess about what it might look like?”
“No.” Keverel shook his head. “Often they are boxes with small slips of paper in them. But they can be anything. I will be able to tell if we find it.”
“Who cares if we find it?” Obek said. Remy had been about to ask the same thing. They followed Keverel through the greenhouse and into the Road-builder’s study, a shadowed space littered with stacks of drawings and plans, bound books and strange instruments. A single small window looked out in the direction of the keyhole, which hung like a star formation in the earthen sky.
“If we don’t find the phylactery, the Road-builder will reappear. Could be now, could be in a few days or a week. No way to tell. But I’d like to make sure that he doesn’t come back at all.” Keverel started searching, digging through the furnishings in the Road-builder’s study, picking up speed as he went. At first he looked carefully; then he began to tear the study apart. Ancient scrolls and sheaves of vellum spun to the floor, along with surveying instruments, bound books, delicate scale models of bridges, retaining walls, even the Keep itself.
“What would it look like?” Remy asked, several times, trying to get the cleric’s attention.
Keverel swept clear the top of a drafting table, splattering ink across the maps and plans he had already flung down. He stood, shaking, a cut-glass paperweight held in his hand as if it was a rock he could brain an enemy with.
“Stop,” Remy said. “It won’t bring Kithri back.” He caught the cleric’s arm. Keverel dropped the paperweight. It rolled across the floor as the keep rocked in a tremor, perhaps an echo of its keeper’s death.
Keverel looked at Remy. Then he looked down. “Your box,” he said. “The seals are broken.”
“How do you—” Remy looked down too and saw gelid light spilling upward from the pouch where he kept the box.
“The Road-builder’s death,” Keverel s
aid. “Or the second orb. Perhaps a combination of both. The discharge of magic broke the seals.”
“Catastrophe,” Lucan said. “We were hunted before. Now we will be hunted, and all of the hunters will know where we are.” He looked around as if expecting demons to rise from the stones of the Road-builder’s garden. “The Road-builder knew of Philomen. One wonders if the vizier himself might be waiting for us when we return to the shores of the river.”
Lucan’s anxiety infected Remy, whose mind filled with imagined scenarios. Had he been meant to fall in with Biri-Daar so all of them could be delivered to the Road-builder, decapitating the Knights of Kul at the very moment the city was most endangered by the thinning of the Seal? He couldn’t know. All he could do was look back on what had happened so far and realize that if things had gone differently at any number of moments, Karga Kul would already be doomed.
If, that is, the suddenly unsealed box had not doomed the city all by itself.
Remy could remember feeling that Philomen was among the greatest citizens of Avankil, a leader of all the Dragondown Coast. Now there could be no doubt. He had not only sent Remy out into the deserts to die, he was engineering some kind of plot involving demons and the undead. “If I ever see Philomen again,” he said over the Road-builder’s bones, “I will kill him.”
Overhearing, Biri-Daar came to them. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. First we had best see what Philomen went to all this trouble for,” she said. The rest of them gathered around and Remy set the box on the cleared drafting table. The sigils, both broken and intact, glowed a deep yellow, darkening toward orange. Remy opened the box. Within, set into a velvet bed, was a chisel perhaps eight inches long, octagonal in cross-section with each face carved minutely in long strings of runes.
“Ah,” said Keverel and Biri-Daar simultaneously.
Another glow appeared from a writing desk in a corner of the study. Every head turned to see that it came from a quill in a jar. The quill was long and curling, cut from the tail feather of a phoenix and burning as brightly as if that bird was at that moment immolating itself. But it was not burning; it was aglow, fiercely, as if challenging the chisel that at that moment was rising from the box.
“Hold it, Remy,” Biri-Daar said. “Steady it.”
“No,” Keverel said, but Remy had already caught the chisel. It was hot in Remy’s hands, but not too hot. The cleric looked as if he might say something else, but he held his tongue and went to the writing desk. Gently he touched the quill and plucked it from the inkwell in which it stood. “It is as I feared,” he said softly.
“What is?” Paelias asked.
“The Road-builder’s phylactery is Moidan’s Quill,” Keverel said. “We must get to Karga Kul before he returns.”
BOOK V
BETRAYAL
An hour after the Road-builder’s death, the six survivors clustered just outside the portcullis at the Keep’s main gate. “Obek,” Lucan said for perhaps the fifth or sixth time. “You heard this from someone who claimed to have heard it from someone who knew the man who had no hands that claimed to have lost his hands in this very keep. Do I have that right?”
“Give or take one someone,” Obek said.
“I don’t believe it.”
“Our alternative seems to be climbing back up the inside of the Road-builder’s Tomb,” Paelias said.
“Would you like me to go first?” Obek said. “I’m willing.”
“How will we know it works?” Lucan asked.
“Enough,” Biri-Daar said. She stepped forward and cast the rope off the broken bridge. It snaked out, falling into the sky, looking terribly frail and thin when it had reached its full length. Biri-Daar stepped back. “If you’re still willing, Obek.”
“Ah,” he said. “Sacrifice the tiefling.”
“The tiefling should perhaps remember that he offered.”
Everyone stood around for a count of perhaps ten. Then Obek picked up the rope, swung it loosely around one gloved forearm, and lowered himself over the edge. They watched him descend until he was out of sight. “We should still be able to see him,” Paelias said. “There is an illusion at work.”
The rope appeared to swing loosely in the breeze below—above—the Keep. “Lucan,” Biri-Daar said. “Then Keverel, then Paelias, then Remy, then me.”
In that order they descended the rope and disappeared. “Probably the tiefling is killing us one by one as we appear … wherever it is that we appear,” Paelias said as he swung over the edge. “Just remember as you die that I told you not to trust him.”
“Those will be my last thoughts. Yes, they will.” Remy cast his eyes to the heavens, and was unsettled when he found himself looking up the Whitefall rapids toward a spectacular waterfall, its curtain of mist picked out in the evening sun even though the bottom of the canyon was in darkness.
Biri-Daar nudged him. “Your turn.”
With the rope in his hand, Remy paused. “The Road-builder knew that the quill was necessary to keep Karga Kul from being overrun. To keep the demons on the other side of the Seal.”
“What better way to guarantee a long life?” Biri-Daar said. “Or unlife. We’ll talk this over when we’re on the ground. Right now the goal is to get there. Go.”
Remy went, lowering himself up into the sky. For the first time since coming out into the courtyard of the Keep, Remy felt strong vertigo. He shut his eyes and concentrated on letting himself down, hand over hand, bracing himself with a coil of rope around one foot. The thought occurred to him that he might open his eyes and find himself on the Astral Plane. But when he did open them, as his feet found solid ground, he was standing on the rune-scored stones of the keyhole. The rest of the group had already built a fire and set to having a look at some of the more interesting objects they had found in the keep. Paelias, Keverel, and Lucan read over some of the Road-builder’s scrolls. Obek was tapping at the stone in a ring he had taken from the dead Moula. He also carried a satchel filled with other booty, such as they had found in their brief search of the Road-builder’s study and other parts of the Keep on their way to the broken bridge.
No one had yet said a word about Kithri, but all of them felt her absence. When Biri-Daar appeared no one asked how it happened that they could climb down into the sky and end up where they had ended up. The Road-builder’s magic, the magic of the Inverted Keep itself … some phenomena did not bear close examination. If they happened, they happened. They were to be experienced, not understood.
Paelias, crosshatched with cuts from his trip through the greenhouse window, was the first to address their situation head-on. They had eaten, drunk, passed around the last of a flask of spirits Lucan had picked up back at Crow Fork Market. The eladrin was whittling a small flute when in the middle of the task he broke off and said, “The way I understand things, our situation is thus. We are in possession of Moidan’s Quill that is needed to reinscribe the Seal of Karga Kul. We are also in possession of a chisel that one assumes was intended to destroy that seal. Moidan’s Quill cannot be destroyed except at the cost of losing the city of Karga Kul to demons; if the quill is not destroyed the Road-builder will appear in its vicinity at some indeterminate but not distant time. So our current task is to get to Karga Kul, talk to the Mage Trust, evade capture or death at the hands of the vizier of Avankil and his minions, and replenish the Seal so that the quill can be destroyed. Do I have that right?”
“In a general sense,” Biri-Daar said.
“What about the chisel?”
“The chisel … Remy, let me see it,” Keverel said. He inspected it for a moment before going on. “Those runes speak of service to the Demon Prince Orcus. He and his army are massed on the other side of the Seal, awaiting their chance to pour across any threshold into our world. Clearly Philomen has pledged his life and his service to the forces of the Abyss. Just as clearly, he hoped to get the chisel to Karga Kul, either via allies in Toradan or by other means we have not yet understood.”
Keverel
handed the chisel back to Remy. “The chisel and the quill must be kept apart. Philomen will be on the hunt for one; we must not let him capture both in the event that things do not fall our way.”
“No. We were drawn together,” Biri-Daar said. “Bahamut has made it so. Do you not see? The restoration of the Knights of Kul and the salvation of the city of Karga Kul, these are the same task. Bahamut has led me to destroy Moula, the apostle of Tiamat. Now he leads me on to finish the work against the demons of the Abyss that threaten the city of the Order’s birth. Our two errands are the same. It is time to finish them together.”
The two locked gazes. “I do not know if this is wise, Biri-Daar,” Keverel said. “The breaking of the box will have alerted Philomen to our location. He will waste no time trying to get the chisel back. If we are to stay together, we need to move fast and be on our guard.”
“To Karga Kul, then,” Lucan said. “But we all knew that already.”
“And how are we to get there before the Road-builder comes back?” Remy asked. “How far is it?”
“On foot, ten days. On horse, four.”
“In ten days, we will have met the Road-builder again,” Keverel said. “Perhaps even in four.”
“Then we must travel more swiftly,” Paelias said. “We must return to Iskar’s Landing and trade on the hospitality of the halflings again. The river will take us to the cliff landing below Karga Kul in two days, will it not?”
“It will, but I fear those halflings will not be nearly so happy to see us now that Kithri is dead,” Lucan said.
