Alex Irvine - The seal of Karga Kul

Kithri scampered up the support beams and crabwalked along the timbers, trying to get a position above the troglodyte while Remy joined the front line, striking low as Lucan had. The troglodyte roared and shifted off its wounded leg, a wild swing from its club shattering the doorframe of the closest stable. It swung again, off balance; Biri-Daar parried its stroke and Lucan drove his sword into its side. Kithri, seeing opportunity, leaped from the ceiling corner and landed on its shoulder. As her feet touched on its shoulders, she lanced the troglodyte’s eyes with twin daggers and leaped away again.

It spun, swinging blindly and missing everything but more timbers. Biri-Daar hacked its right arm mostly off. Remy struck again at the back of its wounded leg. The troglodyte toppled over, its club crashing to the floor next to it. Lucan struck the death blow, opening its throat as it struggled to rise.

In a fury, he was standing over the groggy and terrified stabler Wylegh before the troglodyte had finished dying. “You’ve got some fast talking to do if you want to save your life, friend,” he said, his bloodied sword hovering over Wylegh’s face. “We walk in at your invitation, and the minute we get out of the light there are hobgoblins everywhere. You make a deal with them? Who paid you? What did they want?”

Biri-Daar and Iriani squatted on either side of Wylegh, adding to his fear. Against the other wall of stables, Keverel and Kithri collaborated on ministering to the cleric’s wounds, Keverel whispering healing charms and Kithri sticking on plain old bandages.

“They wanted him,” Wylegh babbled. He was pointing at Remy, who stood a little off to the side and behind the three interrogators. “That’s all they said. Him, the messenger.”

“Who said?” Lucan asked quietly, leaning his sword point a little closer.

“Imps. Imps. They made a deal, they made promises, but it wasn’t just that, once they had me they wouldn’t let go-”

“Fool,” Biri-Daar said. “That’s the only kind of man who makes a deal with anything that comes out of the Abyss.”

“Easy for you to say,” Wylegh said, glaring hard at her. “You dragonborn have got a bit of the Abyss in you, I reckon.”

She stood over him for a long moment, so still that Remy was sure her next move would be a downward stroke to end Wylegh’s life. Yet when she did move, it was to turn her back on him. “Remy, select a horse. Wylegh, tell me how much the horse costs. We will pay you. Then we will make sure that everyone in the market knows what you have done.”

There was a pause. “That’s a death sentence,” Wylegh whispered.

“Hardly,” Iriani said. “You’ll just have to put on your traveling clothes and take one of your horses out on the road. Shouldn’t be too hard. After all, that’s how you got here, no?”

They left Wylegh there while Remy, with Lucan’s aid, selected a horse. It was a fine, large gelding, dappled gray and remarkably calm given everything that had just happened outside its stable door. “How much?” Biri-Daar asked.

“Take it,” Wylegh said. He hadn’t moved from the floor near the tack bench where she had first knocked him over. “Just take it.”

“I pay for what I take,” she said. “Name a fair price.”

Wylegh said nothing.

“Lucan,” Biri-Daar said. “What is that horse worth?”

“What’s it worth, or what would he charge for it?”

“What’s it worth?”

“Eighty, ninety,” Lucan said. “That’s being a bit generous.”

“Generosity never goes unrewarded in the end,” Biri-Daar said. She produced a pouch and counted out the money onto the tack bench. “Traveling money for you,” she said. “We’ll be by for our horses first thing in the morning.”

They took rooms for the night in a public house adjoining the keep, where the Council of Crow Fork itself guaranteed their safety and posted guards at doors and windows. “We have been fortunate,” Biri-Daar said. “First, that we have come through these betrayals with so little suffering. Second, that Iriani is known to the council and could get us a hearing before them.

“And there might yet be a third bit of fortune,” she finished. “Remy, for the third time. What is it you carry?”

“I told you I don’t know,” Remy said. “The vizier forbade me to look at it. I’m guessing he put some kind of protection on it to make sure I wouldn’t.”

“I am going to show you a few things that Roji showed me,” Iriani said as he made a gesture over the box. The characters carved into its lid gave off a brief, pale glow. “You guess correctly,” Iriani said. “There are several different charms on it. One so it can be found in the event…” He glanced up at Remy. “In the event that the courier doesn’t finish his errand. Others to prevent scrying its contents or physically opening it. It’s thoroughly trapped and ensorcelled, this box. Whoever is sending it-also whoever is receiving it-thinks it’s very important.”

“And someone involved in the creation of the box and the protection of its contents,” Biri-Daar added, “has added an appeal to Tiamat’s protection.”

Turning back to the rest of the group, he said, “I should have seen this before. It was there to see, but I didn’t know what to look for. After talking to Roji and seeing imps…” He trailed off.

“What about the imps?” Remy asked.

“They tend to appear as emissaries between certain underworld beings and certain corrupt mortals,” Keverel said. “Certain forces are looking for you, or for what you carry. They are mostly looking along the Toradan Road, or we would have seen much stiffer resistance so far.”

“Here’s my guess,” Iriani said. “There are two factions in Toradan. One is waiting for whatever Remy has because they want to use it the way it was intended to be used. The other is trying to prevent it from getting there because they want to use it as leverage for some other goal. Which is which and who is who, that we might find out more about.”

“Either way,” Lucan added with a tap on Remy’s shoulder, “there’s not much interest in keeping you alive.”

“Put another way,” Biri-Daar said, “Philomen is involved with demons. He may not know it, but that is the case. And if Tiamat’s protection has been solicited…” She trailed off, lost in thought.

“What?” Iriani prompted. “Dragonish business, no doubt, but are we going to be seeing drakes in the skies on the way to Karga Kul?”

“No, not that,” Biri-Daar said. “But I fear what might await us at the Bridge of Iban Ja.”

She would say no more on the subject, and after a short meal taken mostly in silence, the party retired each to his or her own thoughts. Remy’s head spun as he lay on the straw mattress. Imps? Tiamat? What was he carrying? Suddenly he wanted very much to go home and forget he had ever met the vizier of Avankil. The Quayside life was for him…

Yet when he dreamed, it was of places he had never yet seen in waking life.

“The market is supposed to be a sanctuary,” Keverel said with some sorrow the next morning. They were sitting around the central oasis. Once it had been a spring in the desert. After centuries of development, it was a rectangular pool, with stone steps built into all four sides so visitors could step down and fill their canteens while merchants and travelers haggled in the surrounding plaza. It reminded Remy of one of the courtyards of Avankil, where noblewomen under parasols gossiped while flanked by tiefling bodyguards, which were the current fashion in the city. Along one side of the oasis plaza, the keep loomed, extending to the market’s north wall. The other three sides were lined with permanent houses and trading posts maintained by the Dragondown’s established mercantile clans, interspersed with other clearinghouses of families from as far north as the Nentir Vale. In the plaza, Crow Fork Market had the aspect of a city coming to be. A hundred feet in any direction-save for into the keep itself-it looked like a bazaar again.