by Alex Irvine
Uliana, the flaming quill in her hand, added the last characters. The shadows on the wall had acquired a human silhouette. “Quickly,” Keverel said as Remy drew his sword and faced the silhouette. “Remy. Not yet. We need both of your hands.”
He sheathed his sword and joined the rest of the group at the edges of the fading seal. Its sigils were burnt-out, blackened as if by the fires of the hellish plane they held back. The six of them got their hands under the edges of the seal. Remy looked at Biri-Daar, awaiting a cue. “Hands under the edge,” Biri-Daar said. “Ready. Three. Two. One.”
They lifted. The Seal came away from the portal and the chamber floor, surprisingly light in Remy’s hands. As it did, sulfurous smoke boiled around the edges of the portal and under his feet. Remy felt it begin to slide and rise. It tilted. He fought for his balance. He and Biri-Daar, still on the portal itself, slipped farther from the edge. If they did not let the Seal go, they would pull it out onto the portal … and their straining comrades with it.
Remy and Biri-Daar flung the crumbling Seal away, clearing the boundary between portal and floor. The air around him burned and shimmered and he saw that the portal was starting to sink into the floor. A clear gap emerged on the opposite side of the portal. Demonic shapes scrambled up through it. On the side closest to Remy and Biri-Daar, the honor guard of the Knights of Kul stepped out onto the portal. “Now!” Uliana cried out, her ruined eye leaking tears and blood.
“Now or never,” Biri-Daar growled. She cut down the first demon out onto the portal.
A shape resolved from the shadows along the wall—tall, cadaverous, bearing a staff …
No, Remy thought.
It was not the Road-builder, returning at the last moment as his phylactery the quill burned away to nothingness in Uliana’s hand. Where Remy had expected the Road-builder stood Philomen, vizier of Avankil. But it was a Philomen transformed—his skin pallid, eyes alight with a fire like the fire that bled around the edges of the portal and flicked at the legs of the demons who continued to pour through the gap. The head of his staff, which back in Avankil was a seven-pointed star worked in emeralds and gold, was now a pale green iridescent skull. Like Shikiloa’s, Remy saw—a replica of the Wand of Orcus.
With a flick of one hand, Philomen froze the Knights carrying the Seal. “Look at me, noble dragonborn,” he said, voice low and inviting.
“No!” Biri-Daar roared, but they were looking … and they were falling, unconscious, the seal banging to the floor and crushing one of the knights beneath it. He lay, his life bleeding out of him, eyes unfocused, the pain not reaching through the vision of death Philomen had laid over them. More demons vaulted up through the gap. Remy joined Biri-Daar at the gap, cutting the insectile limbs from a mezzodemon as Biri-Daar slashed the wings and the head from a vrock flapping up behind it.
Philomen called out a word in a language Remy did not recognize. The demons stopped, not advancing but not retreating either. “Remy,” Philomen said, almost kindly. “My most trusted courier. You have completed your errand at last … although not without some unfortunate detours along the way. Come now. All is forgiven. I will take the chisel now, and events will run their destined course.”
Remy removed the chisel from its case, where he had kept it despite the breaking of the magical seals. He let the case fall to the floor and held it up as if it were a knife. “Was it you that time, in Sigil?” he asked. “Did you send me there, mark me, send me back?”
“It wasn’t so direct as all that,” Philomen. “Surely you know that I seldom act so straightforwardly.”
“Until now,” Uliana said.
The hierophant nodded with a glance at the last surviving member of the Mage Trust of Karga Kul. “Until now.”
Uliana stepped forward and confronted him. “This, Philomen, is an act of war by Avankil against Karga Kul. Know that in your lust to serve your master you have doomed not just the people of Karga Kul but the people of your own city as well, since war never leaves either side utterly untouched.”
“Uliana, I fear that I am beyond caring what the Mage Trust thinks. My master made his wishes known; I am pledged to bring those wishes about. Thus the chisel, and the final breaking of this moribund seal, which for too long has prevented the real powers of the planes from taking their rightful place at the head and throne of this world.”
Keverel spoke to both of them. “Uliana, you reason with a man who is beyond reason and no longer a man. Philomen, you command this rabble as though you were a hierophant, one of the death priests of Orcus. Surely one so powerful as a hierophant may simply do away with us and go about his business of flooding our world with demonic savagery.”
“Wait,” Remy said. “Philomen. Why do I need to give you the chisel?”
Philomen’s eyes narrowed. “You stand on a very thin edge, Remy. A word from me and you go into Thanatos. Mortals do not return from thence.”
Remy brandished the chisel. “This is what you want,” he said.
“Remy, you mustn’t,” Uliana said. Biri-Daar reached out to him; Remy flinched away.
He faced down the vizier. “Philomen, mortals do not return from Thanatos. Do chisels?”
In Philomen’s face, Remy saw that he was right. “You want the chisel for yourself. If it goes into the Abyss, you’ll never see it again.”
Philomen drew himself up. “Boy. This bravado of yours will fade quickly when you find yourself looking into the face of Orcus.”
The sneering Remy could have stood. The threats were nothing new. But after what he had done during the past weeks, after the betrayal and the bravery, the horrors and the magnificence of the comrades in whose company he had fought his way across the Dragondown … he was not a boy, and would not be called one.
“Boy?” he repeated.
Pivoting, he drove the chisel like a knife through the slack face of the nearest demon. Its skull burst like a rotten fruit and it dropped without a sound. “Boy?” Remy said again. He kicked the demon, rolling it over. “I am no boy to lead by the nose and leave in the wastes to die. Not anymore.”
Another kick sent the demon, and the chisel protruding from its head, over the edge of the portal slab and into the midnight fires of Thanatos.
Philomen said nothing aloud, but Remy’s mind lit afire with necrotic agony as the demon-beholden vizier, once a man and now a death priest hierophant, smote him to his knees. The invading demons sprang back into action and from deep inside the agonized reaches of his brain, Remy heard the sounds of desperate battle. He looked up into the looming maw of a hezrou, the size of a troll—and three arrows, one after another, thwocked into the side of its head. Galvanized, Remy sprang back from its fall, which shook the portal slab. His sword was in his hand and a battle surged around him, tilting and swaying the slab as the combatants ebbed and flowed across its invisible axis.
A flash, gone in an eyeblink but brighter than the sun for the moment of its existence, closed Remy’s eyes. He turned to see what had happened; the talons of a hopping vrock raked down his back; he swung blindly, felt the blade of his sword grate along bone, and saw that Uliana had unleashed some force …
She had brought down the lightning. A thousand feet underground, Uliana had brought down the lightning. Demons lay blackened and unmoving all around. It was, Remy saw, as if the spell she had invoked to protect him from the evistro was a bee sting. Even Philomen staggered—and staggered again as Paelias began to work his fey magic, weaving a thicket of living thorns around the hierophant’s legs. It grew; Philomen killed it with a necrotic touch; it began to grow again. Obek leaped out onto the portal slab, bringing it for a moment nearly level. A plan presented itself to Remy. It depended on a great many things going right—in other words, on luck … “Paelias!” he cried. “It’s luck we need!”
“And luck you shall have!” the star elf cried in return, the silvery and lethal charms of the fey flicking from him like raindrops to dazzle and weaken the demonic foes. Turning his attention back to
Philomen, Paelias called out a charm in the liquid Elvish of the eladrin—Lucan, his bowstring broken, and rushed across to join the melee, snapped his head around, eyes widening at the audacity of his eladrin cousin—and Remy felt a reckless flood of certainty.
Yes. It was daring. It was bold. It would work. Paelias had stolen the hierophant’s luck. It was the great trick of the fey warlocks, dangerous and fickle. There was no telling how long it would last.
Philomen turned to the star elf. “O fey,” he chided. “You would have my luck? We are far past the time when luck could save you.”
Seething necrotic energy arced out from Philomen’s staff and struck Paelias down, the tatters of the eladrin’s fey aura swirling away into the darkness. Keverel fought back, his mace crunching into the vizier’s back, but it was too late. With a wail Paelias covered his face with his hands and pitched over on his side, his legs scissoring along the floor. A hulking goristro demon fell upon him, heedless of Lucan’s arrows—and Remy was too far away.
Paelias had known luck would not save him, Remy thought. That is why he handed it off to me. The footloose eladrin, unwelcome among his own, had died saving the lives of strangers.
Remy charged toward Philomen, the agony of betrayal too much to bear—but luck intervened. A vrock scrabbling through the opening between worlds caught the hem of Remy’s tunic in its beak. He lost his balance on the angled surface of the portal slab, and fell. The vrock raised a talon; he parried it; the vrock let go his tunic and bit into Remy’s shoulder, the hooked tip of its beak punching through armor and muscle straight to the bone. With the hilt of his sword he hammered at the side of its head, again and again, breaking its beak and then shattering its skull. It fell limp and he kicked it back through the gap whence it had come.
“The seal, Remy!” Biri-Daar called. “Now!”
Remy ran to help. Reaching the corner of the seal nearest him, he dropped his sword and found purchase for his hands in the grooves of the deeply cut runes. The magic pouring from them tingled in his fingertips; the wound in his shoulder pained him less, although still terribly. With every pull on the seal, the muscle in his shoulder tore a little more.
The floor of the chamber was polished to a fine gloss, and the seal too was smoothed by the attentions of long-dead artisans. It moved much more easily than a stone of its weight should have … until it hit the raised lip at the edge of the tilted portal slab. “Lift,” Remy said through gritted teeth—not to Biri-Daar, stronger than he was, but to his shoulder, which screamed out in his head as he bent his legs and strained upward with everything he had. The seal came up off the ground.
Around them the battle surged, Lucan and Keverel and Uliana and the recovered Knights of Kul arrayed against a host of demons that grew with every moment. Uliana’s greatness, Remy realized, would never be known. She brushed aside the demons like flies, destroying them with a thought. Only Philomen was a worthy opponent for her.
And she was slowly, surely, getting the better of him as well. He could draw on the strength of Thanatos, on the awful power of the Demon Prince of the Undeath—but she drew on the power of the very stones from which the city of Karga Kul had been hewn, the unknown thousands of years that men had struggled to keep the demonic hordes from overrunning the mortal plane. All of that—all of what made Karga Kul, Karga Kul—was with her. Philomen struck at her with necrotic horrors, visions of the damned; she struck back with the elemental rage of mountain and sky. Keverel, the holy man of Erathis, fought with her, the strokes of his mace and strength of his faith slowly taking their toll. In Uliana’s remaining eye shone the grim and somehow ecstatic determination of the warrior who knows that she will not survive the day, but knows too that a more important enemy will die with her.
The Knights of Kul killed and killed, also knowing that they were to die. So brave, Remy thought, seeing one of them at last overrun by a swarm of evistros, killing them even as they tore the life from his body. Let me be worthy of that bravery and that sacrifice. And Paelias’s sacrifice of luck.
It was a prayer of sorts, and whether any god heard it—Pelor or Corellon or Erathis or any other—the act itself restored Remy’s resolve and strength. With Biri-Daar on the corner of the seal nearest him, Remy braced his feet on the other side of the raised lip of the portal slab, hauling the seal out over it as Obek pushed from behind and the Knights of Kul gave their lives for their city and the honor of their order. But still the slab and the seal did not meet flush, and the sigils began to flicker. The magic, given its potency by fleshly sacrifice, faded just as fleshly life did—only much faster. “To me, Knights!” Biri-Daar called out, and the four remaining Knights of Kul leaped to her, seeing at once what needed to be done.
They came down on the edge of the slab, forcing it down level with the floor—and the luck fled. Fleeing vrock demons, seeing their last chance, dropped from the darkness above, their sudden weight enough to pitch the slab over to an opposite angle. The seal hung out over the gap created by the tilt. Biri-Daar was left dangling at the end of the Seal, and Remy scrambled back from the sudden appearance of the endless, despairing waste of Thanatos spread out below him. The vrocks scrambled through the gap and were gone … all except one.
It craned its vulture’s neck and bit down on Biri-Daar’s leg. She growled and kicked at it with her other leg. It flapped its great wings and tugged, adding its two claws to the grip on her leg.
The seal began to overbalance and slid, grinding along the edge of the hole between the mortal plane and the infernal Thanatos.
Remy saw it all happening before it happened. Biri-Daar looked up at the seal as she felt it shift. She looked down at the vrock. She looked up into the darkness, toward the towers of Karga Kul that whitely reflected sunlight far above in a world that—Remy realized as Biri-Daar looked back down, and over, and directly at him—she would never see again.
She let go at the vrock’s next tug, and was gone through the infernal gap. Remy cried out, wordless and anguished, lunging for her—but she swung a powerful arm and knocked him away, his extended hand just brushing and tugging at her breastplate and down the length of the arm that shoved him back. Biri-Daar fell, eyes open, sword out, killing the vrock even as its companions swooped up from the black crags and Remy lost sight of her, the world lost sight of her. He scrambled back toward the center of the portal slab, still screaming even as he felt the slab’s inexorable swing, and it closed against the Seal with a boom that rolled up into the invisible heights of the chamber and out into the ends of the hall, far above in the quiet space of the council chamber of the decimated Mage Trust.
Uliana died knowing that the Seal was restored. Paelias, bluish pallor seeping into the skin around his mouth, lay dead near the figure of Philomen, who was on hands and knees.
Remy approached the vizier. There was something in his left hand. He looked at it and put it in the pouch where for the last weeks he had carried the chisel. Then he looked down at the drawn, corrupt face of his former mentor. This, he thought, is the man who got me out of Avankil. For that, despite everything else, I owe him a debt.
“Would the monks at the Monastery of the Cliffs have killed me?” he asked. “If I had lived to reach them? Or would they have taken me to the Road-builder themselves? How did you imagine me dying, Philomen?”
“You did not have all the luck,” Philomen said. “Boy.”
Wordlessly Remy ran him through, leaving his sword where it stood at an angle out from the ribs of the desiccated corpse of the man who had given Remy his first job. But that was when he had still been a boy. He looked around. “Lucan,” he said.
The elf was kicking over the corpses of demons and killing whichever of them stirred. “Remy.”
“Where’s Obek?”
“Here,” came the tiefling’s voice from the other side of the Seal. “Who do you think kept pushing when you were out on the carousel there?” Obek came into view—their light was much diminished, and Remy could barely see him until Keverel, his
voice hoarse with exhaustion, invoked the name of his god one last time, the word Erathis spreading through the chamber, bringing light to the shadows.
“Philomen,” Keverel mused. “Vizier of Avankil.” He walked to the vizier’s body, rolled the staff along the floor with his foot, prodded the many sashes and pouches of the vizier’s robe. “It is a very dark day. Biri-Daar was the greatest of the Knights of Kul. Her memory may yet restore the order to the greatness that is its rightful legacy.” The cleric’s gaze roved over the carnage in the Chamber of the Seal, and came to rest on the Seal itself. “This is now the tomb of Biri-Daar,” he said. “Though few will ever see it.” He made a gesture of blessing over the seal, and it seemed incongruous to Remy, who had seen what lay beneath the floor.
Keverel saw him looking, and must have read the expression on Remy’s face. “Blessings are not for those places that are already holy,” he said. “Surely you have learned this now.”
“Learning,” Obek said. “I am sick of learning. Let us go away from this place to somewhere else, a place where there is nothing to learn.”
The four of them were coming closer to each other, not intending it so but under the power of an impulse to draw together, the four survivors of a journey long and treacherous. “You did well, tiefling,” Lucan said.
“Oh, praise from the elf,” Obek said. He looked at the Seal and at the body of Paelias. “None of us did well enough.”
“But we did,” Keverel said. “Karga Kul stands, and will stand. That, at least, we have done.”
They were quiet for a long while after that, in the glow of Erathis that silvered the bodies of the living and the dead.
BOOK VII
NEXT
The sun on the Dragondown Gulf did as much as anything could to dispel the memories of what had happened inside the cliff. Remy looked up from Cliff Quay. “It’s time to leave this place for a while. There will be unrest in the absence of power,” he said. “The Mage Trust is dead. The seal is restored. Enemies remain. Our victory is partial.”
