Alex Irvine - The seal of Karga Kul

They had received no message from her when the road crew arrived at the door looking to clean up their mess… and them with it.

This was the elite, the foremen and their hand-picked laborers. They were brawny, grim, twirling their picks and mauls with flippant menace. There were dozens of them, crowding the passage from the burial chamber doorway past the first bend and beyond. “Don’t think we can let them rebuild the sarcophagus lid,” Paelias said, looking down at the pieces of it scattered around their feet.

“Not until we get down there,” Lucan agreed.

Remy shrugged. “Or Kithri comes back up.”

“Hold them,” Biri-Daar said.

The words had not left her mouth before Lucan’s arrows were ripping into the front ranks of the crew. As they slowed, piling the others up behind them, Remy and Biri-Daar herself met them at the doorway, holding them at the choke point where they couldn’t use their numerical advantage. Keverel, a step back, held forth his holy symbol. “Erathis commands!” he boomed. “You shall not enter!”

Slowed, pained by the holy force of the god, the undead tried to press forward. “Keep them back, Keverel,” Paelias said. He was leaning over the edge of the sarcophagus, the fingers of one hand resting on the rope. “We’ve got a tug.”

“Remy, you and the eladrin go,” Biri-Daar said. “Lucan too.” She had her talisman of Bahamut out; its fierce glow threw the room’s shadows into sharp relief and washed over the undead crew, driving them back. Remy started to argue, but Lucan shouldered his bow and caught Remy’s arm.

“It’s not cowardice when the chief tells you retreat,” he said. “We go to the Keep. So let’s go.”

When they got back to the sarcophagus, Paelias was already on the rope, skipping nimbly down the seemingly bottomless shaft. “Will the rope hold all of us?” he called.

“Two, anyway,” Lucan answered. “Go quickly and tug when you’re at the bottom. Go!”

Paelias went. Remy and Lucan looked toward the door. Keverel and Biri-Daar appeared to be holding the road crew back. “Go,” Lucan told Remy.

Remy shook his head. “You.”

“Remy, I’m going to have to throw you if you get stubborn. Then your box will break and every demon in the Dragondown will be here before we can catch our breath. Do you want that?” Lucan winked. “Go.”

The rope was taut in Remy’s hands, and trembling as Paelias rappelled farther down below him. His scabbard tangled his legs and his shield scraped against the opposite wall of the shaft as he lowered himself away from the rim. “Go, go,” Lucan said again. He looked up. “How goes it?”

“Move, Lucan!” Biri-Daar’s voice rang down the shaft.

Lucan’s face appeared over the rim. “Remy!” he called. “Is the rope slack under you?”

Remy braced his feet and reached down. The rope moved freely in his hand. “Yes,” he called back. “But I didn’t feel any tug.”

“Devil take the tug,” Lucan said, swinging his leg over the edge. “Going, Biri-Daar! Fall back, let’s go!” As he dropped into the shaft, Lucan looked down over his shoulder. “Quickly, Remy. Quickly. Even Erathis won’t hold them back forever.”

Remy had climbed his share of walls. And drainpipes, rope ladders, timber pilings… if it was a way to get from a low place to a high place or the other way around, Remy had climbed it. But none of that had prepared him for rappelling down a rope into pitch darkness of uncertain depth with a tenuous restraint holding back an undead army above him that would, given the chance, cast his rope down into the darkness after his suddenly falling body. Above him, he saw Lucan’s silhouette, and above it the rectangle of the sarcophagus rim, illuminated by the flowing energies of Erathis and Bahamut. “Biri-Daar! Keverel!” Lucan shouted. “Let’s go!”

From below Remy heard a voice. Kithri, he thought, but he couldn’t hear what she was saying. He called down to her, but she didn’t answer. Something lethal was doubtless lying in wait for them. Remy rehearsed the ways that he could finish the descent, come down off the rope, find his feet, and be ready to fight while a desperate and cruel enemy awaited him. Would Kithri and Paelias still be alive? He hadn’t heard any sounds of battle, or even the quick sounds of an ambush. No ring of steel on steel, no screams, no crash of bodies…

“Remy,” Kithri said.

She was closer than he would have expected. Remy looked down-and realized that down was no longer down. He was on his belly, scooting backward along a narrow tunnel. What he’d thought was looking down, was looking over his shoulder. Kithri was there, beckoning him. “You need to get off that rope,” she said. “I’m not sure when you move from tomb to keep, but I do know that we can’t be sure how far someone would fall along the way if we got too many people on that rope. Come on.”

He doubled around in the tight space and belly-crawled the rest of the way, coming out into a low, dark room that smelled as bad as any place he had ever been in his life. “Gods,” he said. “What happened in here.”

“Whatever used to happen in the Keep,” Kithri said, “its current residents still need a sewer. Get over here.” She led him across the floor to a raised ledge out of the muck, where Paelias was scraping filth from his boots. “Charming, these acts of derring-do,” the eladrin muttered. “Oh, look, our boy Remy is here. Welcome to the Inverted Keep.”

From the tunnel-the drain, Remy realized-that somehow, through some magic, led to the tomb of the Road-builder, there came a flare of fire. Biri-Daar’s roar echoed after it. Remy started up and headed back toward the mouth of the drain, but Paelias stopped him. Lucan appeared, head and shoulders over the drain’s edge before he realized what he was about to dive into. With an oath to match the environment, he pulled up short. “What have we done here?” he said.

As he skirted the edge of the sewer pit, Biri-Daar skidded out of the drain. “Keverel!” she called.

The cleric’s voice sounded very far away. “Coming…”

A moment later he struggled into view. Blood covered the left side of his face and he moved gingerly as he swung his legs around to step down. “Took a fall,” he said. “The road crew was kind enough to throw the rope down while they restored the tomb to its pristine state.”

Heedless of the thigh-deep filth, Biri-Daar recrossed the sewer pit and lifted Keverel into her arms. She set the cleric down on the ledge. “Lucan,” she said. “See to him.”

The ranger looked over Keverel, first checking to see that the gash on his head was superficial and then working down the length of his body. “Nothing seems broken,” he said, “and I think the cut on his head is just a cut on his head. What say you, holy man? Take a drink.”

Keverel drank from the skin Lucan offered. He pushed himself to a sitting position against the wall and said, “My head aches and only this witch doctor of a ranger would say that nothing is wrong with the rest of me. But I’ll feel better if we get out of this stench.”

“Me too,” Kithri agreed. “As it happens, there’s a door right over here.”

By the light from her knife blade, she showed them a barred iron door. “An old lock,” she said, producing a set of picks folded into a leather purse. “I’ll have it open before Lucan can find something else to complain about.”

“I doubt that very much,” Lucan said. “For example, I will complain about Keverel’s ignorance of shamanistic traditions among the rangers of the Nentir Vale.”

The lock popped open. “See?” Kithri said.

“See what? I complained,” Lucan said.

“No, you said you were going to. I win.” She smiled sweetly at him and swung the door open with a shriek of rusted hinges that must have been audible to every denizen of the Keep.