by Alex Irvine
Already Remy was aching for the lost opportunity of Sigil. If only he hadn’t waited, if only he had seized the chance when he’d had it instead of running around like a child looking for his mother.
“Young man,” the potato-man said. “You are awaited elsewhere.”
I could carve you into chips, Remy thought. But he walked to the door and put the demon’s coin in the slot.
And his hand came away damp from the condensation on the inside of the basement room’s one stone wall.
Outside, in the Avankil street where Remy had fled the gang, the normal voices and sounds of the city echoed from storefront to storefront. From the floor above, he heard a man and a woman arguing. Home.
Remy sniffed at his sleeve. Earth, smoke, sulfur, perfumes distilled from plants that grew nowhere on this world …
Sigil!
“Quite a tale, lad,” Vokoun said. “Either there’s depth to your character or a liar’s skill in your tongue.”
Obek clapped Remy on the shoulder, and in the same motion prevented him from leaning forward with a retort to Vokoun’s provocation. “A tale-teller’s skill,” Obek said. “I’ve been to Avankil. What else do these boys have to do when they’re lying around the docks with the rats all day?”
Laughter erupted around the fire, and Remy took the joke in good humor. Coming from Obek it was easier. There was no deceit in him. Nor was there any malice. Tieflings were notorious for both, which either made Obek unusual for his race or meant that the other citizens of the Five Cities didn’t know tieflings very well. “Crow Fork Market reminded me a little of it, but I didn’t want to say anything.”
“Wise,” Lucan commented. “We barely believe you now. Then, before we’d seen you in action, we’d never have taken you seriously.”
“I wasn’t even there, and I can agree with that,” Paelias agreed.
“Is it true?” Vokoun said.
Remy nodded, looking into the depths of the fire. He fancied he could see a tiny salamander, a scout from the Elemental Planes sent to see if the suddenly exposed chisel was of interest to the elemental powers … then it was gone. “Yes,” he said. “It’s true. I’ve never seen it since. I would like to go there again.”
“The Lady of Pain has walking potatoes for servants?” Vokoun looked as if that, more than anything else, was impossible to believe.
“I don’t know what he was, really,” Remy said. “That’s what he looked like, though.”
“The part that worries me is the devil giving you a coin,” Biri-Daar said. Remy looked at her and could see her measuring him yet again, deciding where his obligations lay, and his loyalties. The story disturbed her, he could tell. It disturbed him as well; how was he to know whether some kind of spell or curse had been placed on him?
“Paelias,” Remy said.
The star elf held up a hand. “Biri-Daar,” he said, “devils have many reasons for doing what they do. There is no taint of the Abyss on Remy, save the chisel.”
“How much more do you need?” Obek joked.
“Silence,” Biri-Daar said. “We weigh the success of our quest here, and the survival of Karga Kul. It is no time for jokes.”
“Every time is a time for jokes,” Obek shot back. “Especially the most serious times.” His sword sang out of its scabbard and hung perfectly level, its point an arm’s length from Remy. “So. Do we kill the boy and take the chisel ourselves? Do we kill the boy and destroy the chisel? Or do we quit this arguing and go on to do what needs to be done?” At each question, Obek turned the blade of his sword, walking the gleam of firelight up and down its length. “Me, I just need to get back into Karga Kul. Whatever makes that happen faster, I am for.”
“Put up your sword, tiefling,” Biri-Daar said evenly.
He looked at her. “I am called Obek.”
After a pause, Biri-Daar took her hand from the hilt of her own sword. “Put up your sword, Obek,” she said.
The blade flashed once more as Obek reversed and sheathed it. “There,” he said. “Done. Now let us go to Karga Kul.” Then he looked at Remy, who had not moved during the whole exchange. “Joke, my friend. It was a joke. No one was ever going to get killed.”
Maybe not, Remy thought. But he also thought that Obek was going to be in for a surprise if he ever came after Remy seriously. Remy wasn’t a Quayside urchin anymore, or even the vizier’s messenger. Somewhere along the Crow Road, he had become a warrior.
They pushed out into the lively current of the Whitefall an hour after sunrise the next morning, Vokoun at the tiller whistling an elf melody. The river was narrow and fast but mostly flat for the day, he said. “Just one bit of white water to get through, past the crook below Vagnir’s Ledge.”
“Sounds like there’s a story in that name,” Remy commented. He was just behind Vokoun, enjoying the feel of the boat on the water. The rest of the party was clustered closer to the middle of the boat, trying to stay out of the oarsmen’s way.
“There’s a story in every name,” Vokoun said. “Most of them aren’t worth telling.”
The story of Vagnir’s Ledge, Remy found out later, concerned a suicidal dwarf and a chance encounter with a griffon, after which the dwarf became a legendary hero among his people—who inhabited the caves along that part of the canyon. But before Remy ever heard that story, he and the rest of the group very nearly ran afoul of those dwarves’ ancient enemies.
After a full day of riding the river, monotony broken only by the occasional nibble of a fish on the hooks they trailed behind the boat, they tied up to a leaning oak tree, its branches spreading a good fifty feet out over the water and its roots exposed at the river’s edge. “In ten years it’ll be a snag,” Vokoun said.
“In ten years, you might be a snag too.” Paelias jumped nimbly from the boat up to a low-hanging branch and swung into the tree. The rest of the non-halfling passengers disembarked onto the shore while the crew made the boat fast and cleaned out the day’s trash. They clustered in a flat crescent at the base of a wooded mountainside, with the sound of a stream nearby and the forest canopy alive with the energetic songs of birds. “This would be a fine place to settle,” Paelias said from his perch.
Some of the halflings hopped out of the boat and set to work building a fire at the shoreline. “Someone’s been here before, and didn’t like it,” one of them said, holding up a skull.
“Maybe not such a fine place to settle,” Remy said. He and Lucan scanned the edges of the clearing.
Keverel examined the skull while the halflings finished laying the fire. “Whoever this was, a blade killed him, and not two years ago,” he said. Something crashed in the woods, some distance above them. The sun was low; already it was dusk in the trees and on the water, and the light falling on the other side of the Whitefall’s canyon was darkening to orange.
More crashing from the trees put them all on guard. Vokoun and the four halfling rowers cocked small crossbows and clustered together. Remy drew his sword and heard the creak of Lucan’s bowstring. “Erathis,” Keverel murmured, and at the invocation of the god a dim glow spread from the edge of the woods. Remy could see it playing along the edges of swords and the curves of helmets. But it was not men they were going to fight.
“Death knights,” Paelias said as the undead soldiers broke into the open clearing. The halflings cocked crossbows and the party fell into combat order, their backs to the river. Remy had heard of death knights. In the stories, a single one of them could tear through a company of marching soldiers as if they were farmhands. At the edge of the trees, he could count at least a dozen of them. Perhaps more.
One, a dragonborn, larger than the rest and clearly the leader, stepped forward and raised a hand to arrest the progress of its subordinates. They stood at attention, eyes dimly aglow along with the steel they wore. “Biri-Daar of the Knights of Kul,” the champion said.
She stepped forward to face it. “Once you were Gouvou, were you not?”
“Once I was living Gouvou. Now I a
m a servant of Orcus and my name is no longer of any use.”
“Yet I will call you Gouvou,” Biri-Daar said. “Because that is the name attached to your treachery.”
“What have I betrayed? Surely not the legacy of the Knights. That was formed at the Gorge of Noon, at the southern foot of Iban Ja’s bridge. Moula carried it on. I carry it on.” Gouvou opened his jaws wide, threw his head back, and roared. A column of flame, burning the color of shadow, or clouds on the horizon lit by distant lightning, erupted from his mouth—and the radiance of Erathis disappeared.
“It is their unholy fire,” Keverel said. “He may think it has driven the light of Erathis away, but he will discover differently.” The cleric touched his holy symbol to his lips, then drew his mace up and held it at the ready.
“He did not?” Remy said softly.
Keverel shook his head. “I could bring it back. But to what purpose? We can see them now.”
Biri-Daar drew her sword. “Single combat,” she said. “Hold your minions to it.”
“You put me at a disadvantage. Will your fellows submit should I defeat you?” Gouvou laughed, a sound like the rattle of a snake. The sound hung in the air, against the backdrop of the river’s rush.
Remy never saw the signal, but at some unspoken sign the two dragonborn, one living and one dead, came together, swords ringing against each other and striking sparks from decorations on armor. The halfling crew kept their crossbows at the ready, but Vokoun held them back from firing. Keverel did the same for the rest of the party. Remy had never seen a ritual single combat before. Fights on the Avankil waterfront did not have rules. Even when one party called a man-to-man duel, there was always someone willing to slip in from behind and change the odds. The only halfling Remy had known at home specialized in slipping out of crowds to hamstring participants in such duels. He made a fine income at it until his face became known and someone cut his throat in a crowd before he could come out of it to cut a tendon.
That was Avankil. This was the lower Whitefall, and the death knights stood back as did the living friends and comrades of Biri-Daar.
Gouvou fought with a speed and agility that belied the death of his body. Remy had never seen a living being move so fast; Biri-Daar kept up, but only just. She parried, and took the blows she could not parry at an angle, striking back enough to keep Gouvou honest … or so Remy thought until he heard Keverel chuckle. “She’s learning,” the cleric murmured. “In another moment …”
Biri-Daar flicked the death knight’s blade aside and struck deep, through his armor and into the undead flesh below. Gouvou made a coughing noise and rang his blade off the side of Biri-Daar’s helmet. Dented, the helmet tumbled away until one of the watching death knights stopped it with his foot. Biri-Daar wounded him again, under the arm—and again, at the joint of his hip. Gouvou stumbled, the rhythm of his combat broken. Biri-Daar opened his armor from collarbone to nipple on the right side.
In his extremity, the death paladin found a last well of strength. Gouvou blasted Biri-Daar back with a storm of unholy fire, the shadowy flames pouring over her and driving her to one knee. She held there. Remy started forward; Keverel stopped him—as the steady clear light of Bahamut shone forth from Biri-Daar’s holy symbol, blazing through the unholy flames. She put her hand on her sword and rose slowly to her feet. The two faced each other.
“Biri-Daar, you fight for a legacy that never existed. This is the true legacy of the Knights of Kul,” Gouvou said, spreading his arms as unholy flames licked along the rents in his armor. Behind and around him, the same flames played across the bodies of the other knights. They raised their swords.
Biri-Daar roared out a gout of fire, overwhelming the unholy flames and scorching the undead flesh from Gouvou’s body. At the same time, Remy and Obek leaped forward. Obek shattered the death knight’s sword and Remy his breastplate and the bones underneath. Gouvou went down, reaching for his sword, but Obek cut off the reaching skeletal hand. Remy drove his sword point through the hole in Gouvou’s armor, feeling the blade punch through the armor on his back and sink into the ground. All around them, the subordinate death knights were attacking again. Remy spun away from a looping mace head, letting go of his sword and leaving it in the destroyed remains of what had once been the dragonborn paladin Gouvou. Obek cut down the death knight who had swung at Remy, and Remy reached to pick up a sword from the ground.
“No!” Lucan called. “It contains a soul!”
Remy’s fingertips brushed the hilt and he heard—as clearly as he once had heard voices from Avankil through an open door in Sigil—the soul speak to him. Instantly he knew everything there was to know about this halfling who had become a death knight. He was from a small village in the highlands outside Furia. He had fought, and fought well, in wars against the enemies of his liege. He had married, and begat children … and then been corrupted. In Avankil.
By Philomen.
The vision vanished as Remy heard the thundering crunch of Keverel’s mace. He looked and saw that Keverel had just crushed the final unlife from a halfling death knight in the act of reaching for the sword Remy’s fingers had just touched. With the fatal blow, the soul had departed from the weapon that bound the death knight’s essence.
More of them were coming from the woods. Two of Vokoun’s halflings were down. Keverel’s helmet was knocked off and the upper part of his left ear was hacked away. Biri-Daar bled from every limb, it seemed. Obek, Paelias … they were all wounded, and tiring, and the death knights still came from the trees.
Philomen had sent them. The vizier’s power reached even to the lower Whitefall.
The halflings called from the shore. All three of them fired their crossbows in the direction of the boat. “More of them!” Vokoun called. “In the water!”
“To the boat!” Biri-Daar roared out. They fought a steady retreat, holding back the flood of death knights as Lucan turned and unleashed a barrage of arrows at targets Remy couldn’t see. Two of the death knights reached the trunk of the leaning oak and began to climb.
Remy broke away from the group, seizing a long sword from the ground. He killed the first of the two death knights before it knew he was coming. The second, already clasping the tree’s lowest branch, knocked Remy sprawling with a booted kick to the side of his head. When he got up, he could tell that one of his eyes wasn’t focusing properly, and his ears rang. Still he jumped and grabbed the death knight around the legs. The branch broke off from their combined weight and they fell, the impact sending an agonizing throb through Remy’s head. He shoved the death knight away, clearing space for a sword stroke that opened its throat. It grinned horribly through the blood and Remy barely parried its return thrust … but parry it he did, and the death knight overbalanced ever so slightly.
In the moment when it was extended, its sword too far out and its cut throat fountaining blood onto the forest floor, Remy struck off its head. He turned and headed for the river’s edge, where the rest of the group were standing knee-deep and boarding the boat. Lucan’s arrows helped to hold the death knights back, but some of them waded straight in, and Remy could see another emerging from the water below the tree. “Lucan!” he shouted, pointing—but too late. It severed the boat’s mooring rope before three arrows punched down into it. Looking up, the death knight drew a throwing knife. A fourth arrow appeared to sprout from its armor, a perfect shot just to the left of the breastbone.
Its life force draining away, the death knight raised both hands and clapped them together. As it sank beneath the surface, the tree, and Lucan in it, burst into unholy flames.
Lucan screamed and leaped from the branch into the water, trailing the awful radiance of the unholy flames behind him. The tree burned as if it had been dead and seasoning for two winters, flames roaring up from it to cast flickering shadows on the combat at the shore. “Lucan’s in the water!” Remy shouted. Over the roar of the burning tree, no one could hear him. He dropped his sword, got a running start past the leaning trunk,
and dived out over the boat into the black water beyond.
It was cold and his armor was heavy, dragging him down so fast that he could see the bottom, dimly illuminated by the burning tree. Lucan was close enough to touch; the unholy flames were still dying on his body and his eyes were wide with shock. Remy caught him and kicked hard for the surface, pitting his strength against the weight of the armor. It was a struggle he would only win for a few seconds. The hull of the boat above was a leaf-shaped blackness against the infernal orange of the flames. Remy reached, and kicked, and did not know he had thrust one arm out of the water until strong hands grabbed it and pulled him the rest of the way up. “Remy!” Keverel cried. He held Remy’s arm while Obek and Paelias pulled Lucan into the boat.
“Row!” Vokoun ordered. The boat was drifting, far enough out into the water that the death knights could not reach it—or reach up to it from the riverbottom. Remy could see seven of them still, grouped on the shore watching the boat.
Keverel began ministering to Lucan as Obek helped Remy out of the water. “Brave stuff there,” the tiefling said.
“And stupid. Who jumps into water wearing a mail shirt and boots?” Vokoun shook his head. “Now that might be a story worth telling. If we live to tell any stories at all.”
Two of the halflings were dead, and the necrotic magic of the death knights’ weapons was working in every wound. Remy could see the flesh beginning to die even around the small nick across the back of his knuckles. Most of the others, cut much more deeply, were groaning and sick with the death rot. “Lucan’s going to die soonest,” Keverel said. “I have to see to him first. Anyone with a healing draught, what are you saving it for?”
Remy had one and gave it to Obek, who was wounded deeply in the side. There were three others for Paelias, Biri-Daar, and Keverel, whose head wound had exposed the bone of his skull just above the ear. The two remaining oarsmen were struggling against the current, which quickened as the river grew narrower and poured through a chute into another spot of flat water between sheer stone walls. “I need more oars,” Vokoun said. Remy sat down at one of the benches and picked up an oar. Obek took another. Paelias joined Keverel at the prostrate Lucan, who was muttering and gasping in a burn fugue.
