Alex Irvine - The seal of Karga Kul

Its cry trailed off and the spear thrust drove through Lucan’s shoulder instead of his ribs, the spear head snapping off on the stone floor. Staggering, the Eye of Gruumsh took another blow as a second knife snapped into the hollow of its throat under the jaw. It dropped straight down, still gripping the haft of the broken spear.

Remy and Biri-Daar pressed the remaining ogre. If there were any more orcs about, they had fled into the deeper recesses of the cave. The ogre fought with a fire-hardened wooden club, broken blades hammered into its head. Knowing it was outnumbered, the ogre backed toward an opening in the cave, forcing them to approach it from the front. Its club made a heavy whoosh with every swing, each powerful enough to splinter a row of skulls and fan their brains out across the nearest wall.

Even an ogre’s strength has limits. Biri-Daar, fearless with the strength of her god, pressed near the limit of the club’s range. She timed the swing and the backswing-once, twice. On the third, she stepped inside and jammed her sword up under the ogre’s armpit. The ogre clamped the wounded arm around the dragonborn paladin, crushing her to it in a suffocating embrace. The club dropped; with its free hand, the ogre tore Biri-Daar’s sword free of its flesh and threw it away.

Then Keverel was there, smashing his mace into the arm that held Biri-Daar. With him came Remy, his blade flicking out in search of the vulnerable gaps in the ogre’s hide armor. Iriani protected the rear, destroying the occasional straggling orc as it appeared.

Last, and most lethally, came Kithri, dancing between the ogre’s legs to open the artery on the inside of its thigh. She was fast, and the ogre was terribly wounded-still it was fast for its size, catching her with a spastic kick that smashed her into the wall. She cried out and rolled away as the mortally wounded ogre toppled against the wall above her and slid down, its wounded leg unable to hold its weight and its lifeblood spilling in a thick fall from shoulder and thigh. Remy stepped in again, thrusting deep into the pit of its stomach. It flailed at him, missing, and Biri-Daar fell away from it, fighting free of its grasp as it slid down the wall and died.

Before it had drawn its last breath, Remy vaulted the body and kneeled next to Kithri. Her face was wild with pain, her teeth bared and gritted. When he picked her up to carry her back to Keverel, she cried out again. “Hush,” Lucan said heartlessly, whatever native tact he possessed temporarily driven out by his own wound. “You’ll draw whatever else lives back in these caves.”

Kithri might have said many things. Instead she took his advice, clamping her mouth shut even when Remy laid her down on the hard stone next to Lucan. She did manage to glare at him; he winked in return.

While Keverel did what he could to heal them both, Biri-Daar called Remy over. “We need to follow these two passages as far as we can, to make sure we got them all,” she said. “There have been no young, which means this is a raiding party. Probably they only planned to stay here a few weeks, until they had despoiled the area. If we had gotten here a few days earlier…” She trailed off and Remy instantly knew what she was thinking.

If they had not stopped to save him, they would have found the orcs before they destroyed the homestead back in the ridge clearing. Saving his life had cost the lives of anyone there.

“It’s a fool’s choice,” Iriani said softly. He too could see where Biri-Daar’s thoughts had gone. “When you can tell the future, paladin of Bahamut, then you may reprimand yourself for telling it incorrectly.”

Biri-Daar looked at him, then around at the carnage. “Let us search and make sure this place is cleansed of its filth,” she said.

“And do bring back whatever you find that is both light and valuable,” Lucan added. He caught his breath as Keverel sank a needle into the meat of his shoulder. “Hurry, before this murderous cleric puts an end to me.”

“We should have such fortune,” Kithri muttered. Her voice sounded odd to Remy but he put the thought out of his mind. Biri-Daar had ordered him to clear out the back tunnels, and clear out the back tunnels he would. Keverel knew his business.

Remy found nothing in the rear tunnels, even when assisted by a cantrip of Iriani’s that set a pleasant light glowing from the buckle of his belt. Trash, bones, filth. Nothing else. He returned the way he had come, carefully, and found both Lucan and Kithri sitting up. “Time to go,” Iriani said.

“This is an awful place,” Lucan groused. “Odor enough to kill you dead, orcs and ogres nearly enough to kill you all over again…”

“… And nothing to show for it,” Kithri finished for him.

“Perhaps it is just that the two most larcenous members of our group did not participate in the search,” Biri-Daar suggested without looking at either of them. She was working with a row of damaged scales on her arm, picking loose the bits that would not heal.

Everyone else in the cave looked at one another to be sure that the paladin had in fact told a joke. They were never sure.

It was true that their search had yielded very little that was valuable, and of that virtually nothing that was light. The only thing of any value was an enormous mirror framed in what looked like silver. Iriani had found it leaning up against a dead end in one of the side tunnels. He could detect no magic in it. “Break off the frame and let’s take it with us,” Kithri said.

Everyone ignored her. Some of them did take the chance to regard the progress of their beards. Of the three who had to shave, none had since leaving Crow Fork Market. “Soon we’ll all look like dwarves,” Iriani said upon seeing himself. “Dwarves who have spent time on the rack.”

When they emerged into daylight again and found their horses cropping the brush at the edge of the river, less than two hours had passed since Remy and Lucan had cut down the two orcs snacking on the ledge. The sun was dropping toward the western peaks. “We’ve wasted the afternoon on this,” Keverel said. “None of us wants to camp so close to that nest, I would guess.”

“You would guess correctly,” Biri-Daar said. “But few of us would wish to go much farther.”

“Then over the next pass,” Lucan said.

Kithri spat from her horse. “This pass, that pass. What difference does it make?”

“Over the next pass is into the final climb toward Iban Ja’s bridge,” Lucan said. “I don’t think we’ll find any orcs or ogres up there.”

“Why not?” Remy asked.

“The cambions and hobgoblins scare them away. Or slaughter them,” Iriani said.

Nodding, Lucan added, “That’s if the sorrowsworn don’t get them first.”

“Sorrowsworn?” Remy had never heard the name. Or term.

“Perhaps you will have the good fortune not to find out,” Iriani said. Nobody would say anything else about it. They rode on, and camped beyond the next pass, alighting from their horses just as the last of the sun vanished behind the mountains, its dying rays slanting up into the sky.

As it turned out, they did not reach Iban Ja’s bridge until the second day after they cleaned out the lair of orcs. Biri-Daar was reluctant to push the pace while Kithri and Lucan were recovering from their wounds. When they did come to the bridge, Remy realized that everything he had heard about it-and by that time he had heard quite a lot-had utterly failed to prepare him for the reality of seeing it for himself.

They had just stopped for lunch at the head of a slot canyon through which the road angled down, following the canyon floor. Already Remy could hear a distant roar, but despite what Biri-Daar and Lucan said, he could not believe that was the sound of a tributary river to the Blackfall, rumbling from the bottom of a gorge said to be a thousand feet deep. “What is it really?” he asked with an uncertain smile. They shook their heads and said if he didn’t believe them, he would just have to see for himself.