Alex Irvine - The seal of Karga Kul

“That’s what I would have said if I could have thought of how to say it,” Remy said. Everyone looked at him and he realized what they were thinking. It was the first time he had claimed a voice in the group.

Biri-Daar cracked a smile. It was the kind of smile, Remy thought, he had seen on the faces of fathers at the sight of their children’s first steps. Partly he was proud of himself and of her regard, and partly he was spurred on by its slight condescension.

“Let us go, then,” she said. “And let us leave the memory of our comrade Kithri the halfling to Avandra. She, patron of halflings, the Lady of Luck and the spinner of fortune’s wheel, she will bring Kithri’s spirit to its rest.” All of them realized toward the end of these words that Biri-Daar was offering up a prayer for Kithri. But before they could grow solemn, Biri-Daar was already walking away down the ridge toward the Tomb Fork of the Crow Road.

As Paelias had predicted and all of them had quietly assumed, Vokoun’s band of river halflings did not greet them as long-lost brothers, or even as fellow seekers after a common goal. The river pilot was cold as he looked from one face in the group to another. “So,” he said at last. “You have added a tiefling and left the halfling behind.”

“She died in the Inverted Keep,” Biri-Daar said. “Died well, in battle against the Road-builder himself.”

“And we have a great need for the speed of your boat, Vokoun,” Keverel added.

“Why would that be? Demons on your trail from the Keep? Dig up something hot from the Tomb?” The halfling, stout and resolute, stood with hands on hips confronting the human cleric and dragonborn paladin.

Lucan stepped forward. “Vokoun,” he said. “Look.” With sleight-of-hand tricks, he made gold coins appear, one after the other, seemingly from thin air. “All of us could use a little entertainment,” he added, “and we need passage aboard your boat. Come now.” He grew sober. “Kithri was a dear friend of mine. None mourns her more deeply than I-and yet there is no time to mourn. Not if we are to get to Karga Kul in time.”

A new campfire blazed up on the sandy spit of Iskar’s Landing. The sun had long since fallen behind the mountains. Down by the river, it was nearly dark under a sky of rich violet streaked with orange near the horizon.

“Teach me that trick,” Vokoun said. “And someone go find the upland men over by the creek. They have spirits. We can’t run the river in the dark, so you have the night to convince me.”

Later, around a fire of their own, Vokoun said, “Once I saved you folk from the yuan-ti. What am I going to be saving you from if I let you on my boat this time?”

“I believe we could have worked things out with the yuan-ti,” Paelias said. “Perhaps the next time we are ambushed, you can observe instead of intervening.”

“Perhaps I will, if only to shut you up, eladrin,” Vokoun said.

“The Road-builder,” Keverel said. “If it is the truth you desire and not a story that will let you pretend to be bolder than you are, there it is. We will carry the Road-builder’s phylactery to Karga Kul. And there, once it has accomplished its last task, we will destroy it. And him with it.”

Vokoun drank and started to speak. Then he thought better of the speech and drank again. After some time, he spoke. “The story is that the Road-builder became a lich.”

“It is true,” Keverel said.

“What happens if I don’t let you on my boat?”

“One of two things. Either we destroy Moidan’s Quill, which is also the Road-builder’s phylactery, and Karga Kul falls to a horde of demons, or we try to get to Karga Kul on foot and run the risk of the Road-builder appearing again before we get there.” Keverel reached out for the bottle and took a drink of his own.

Vokoun took it back, then remembered his manners enough to offer it around before drinking again. “And this phylactery. That’s what brings him back?”

“Until it is destroyed,” Biri-Daar said. “And it can’t be destroyed until we use it in Karga Kul.”

They told stories after that, in turns around the fire. Vokoun began, and spun a comic tale of his ancestors’ first boat, up in the marshes around the great inland sea that was the source of the Whitefall. Paelias picked up the theme of sailing, and told of an eladrin hero who sailed the astral seas of Arvandor in search of a woman stolen from him by Sehanine. Remy listened the entire time trying to figure out if Paelias was talking about himself. When the star elf’s story ended with its hero returning to the Feywild, and from there to the mortal world, without his beloved, Remy felt that he had learned something he might rather not have known. Paelias was a fine companion, and a strong ally in battle. His sorrow, once his story was known, belonged to the company.

He was thinking this while everyone looked at him and he realized it was his turn to tell a story. Having no grand yarns to spin, no epic lies to tell, Remy opened his mouth and said something he had never said before, to anyone. “Once I saw the City of Doors,” Remy said.

It was a secret he had never told anyone, of the time when, running from a gang of older boys, he had leaped across a sewer ditch and skidded on the fog-slick boards he landed on, straight through an open street-level window. He had landed hard, flat on his back, and lain in the darkness trying to get his breath. Outside the window, he heard the other boys laugh-they’d only seen him lose his footing and skid out of sight. When their sounds diminished to silence, Remy rolled over onto hands and knees and looked around to get a sense of whose home or shop he had accidentally invaded. Probably he could climb straight back out with no one ever knowing he had been there; but what would it hurt to take a look around first? If, of course, he wasn’t in the kind of place where a wandering youth could find more trouble than he bargained for. Avankil was full of such places.

Slowly his eyes adjusted to the dimness. The room was narrow and rectangular, with the window in one short side and two doors in the other. The short walls were stone and mortar, slightly damp with the normal condensation of a belowground room, while the long walls were covered with slotted shelves, as if someone had once stored bottles there. Remy could well understand why they no longer did; in this part of Avankil, anything within sight of a window and unprotected by magic or blade would be stolen the moment its owner turned his back. The room was empty now, but knowing Whisker Angle, Remy feared that anything might happen.

All the more reason, perhaps, to get moving and get out of there-but there were those two doors set into the far wall. One clearly led up. A sliver of daylight was visible at its bottom, between door and jamb, and Remy could hear human voices on the floor above, their sound reflecting down the stairs. Three voices, it sounded like, speaking a sailor pidgin Remy recognized but did not understand.

An argument was perfect cover, was it not, for a little exploration?

The second door-it was on the left, and the door met the jamb flush, with no hint of light, noise, or smell from the other side. Remy listened and heard nothing. He opened it, slowly, and when he had opened it halfway he stopped and stared, struck dumb by what was on the other side.

A fat tiefling in a butcher’s apron sorted through a bin of severed wings. “You here about the knucklebones?” he asked gruffly. In one hand he held a long, reptilian wing, with stubby claws at its main flight joint; in the other, a cleaver.

“The what?” Remy said.

“Knucklebones. Wyvern knucklebones. If you’re not here for them, what are you here for?”

“I just-” Remy gestured over his shoulder and glanced back.