Alex Irvine - The seal of Karga Kul

The room he had just been in was no longer there.

He spun back around to see the tiefling grinning at him. “Never been here before? An adventurer.” He waggled a cleaver in Remy’s direction. “Lucky you don’t have wings, boy. You’d have walked out of here without them.”

The tiefling pointed to another door beyond an enormous butcher-block table. “Out is that way. Back to where you came from is somewhere out there. Luck.”

“But-”

“Go, boy. Nothing stays in here but me and dead things.”

Remy went. Out the tiefling butcher’s door, he found himself on a strange street. It was wider than most of the squares in Avankil, and everywhere he saw doors. There were round doors with latches set in the middle, double doors made of stone or pebbled black wrought iron; there were doors in the street itself, and doors that seemed to hang just near a structure without being attached to anything. And among those doors moved… everything. Every race Remy had ever seen in Avankil, or read of in the illustrated scrolls he spied in ship captains’ collections or the vizier’s library, or heard stories of in tallow-stinking taverns or beneath an ancient pier swaybacked with age. Every monstrous humanoid or elemental presence, every glimmering manifestation of astral will, every lumbering undead hulk of the Underdark. Remy was in a place that seemed to have no beginning and no end. No sky arched over the doors and storefronts, no sun shone to cast a shadow. Yet there was light, and there were shadows. No vantage point let him see beyond the limits of the city… yet he could look up and beyond, and there he could spy stars and strange luminescent swirls, as if some deity had taken light and made it into icing for a vast and invisible confection.

He looked down again. A detail jumped out at him: next to the doors that he could see-dozens of them!-was carved a symbol. A hand, fingers up, with a teardrop in the center of its palm.

“Or,” commented a passing elemental wisp, “a drop of blood. The Lady is quite taken with the falling of blood and tears.”

Remy started. “The Lady?”

“Ohhh,” crooned the wisp. It was the color of air, visible only as a distortion of what was behind it. Its eyes were blurs. “You are in Sigil yet you know not of the Lady. A delight! How has this happened? No, wait. You opened a door, did you not? In a city on the mortal plane, where you come from. And you found yourself here.”

“Yes,” Remy said. “But-”

“Where is here? Sigil! City of Doors! Crossroads of the Planes!” The wisp swept in on itself, curled into a spiral as if aspiring to the colors in the sky. “This is the place that is always between all places,” it went on. “The place from which you can get to any other place in a single step. The place that holds Creation together. The knotted, beating heart at the center of all that exists.”

Then it vanished. Its voice, lingering a moment longer, added, “Or perhaps not.”

Remy walked through the city of doors, seeing in each of them a gateway to a world as large and various as his own. Could it be true? “Boy,” a voice hailed from a half-open door set beneath an overhang carved with a large version of the Lady’s symbol in yellow and red. Remy looked and saw a devil, three-eyed and four-armed, with a tail curling around its feet. “You don’t belong here, do you, boy?”

“I’m here,” Remy said.

The devil clapped, one pair of hands slightly later than the other, creating a delayed echoing effect. In the portion of the sky Remy happened to be looking at over its left shoulder and down a short alley beyond which Sigil apparently vanished quite soon, a star went out. “Excellent response,” it said. “The only response that makes sense, which makes you quite out of character here. It is a point of pride among the citizens of Sigil that they make sense to outsiders rarely, and then only when they hope to gain something from it.”

It clapped all four of its hands on Remy’s upper arms. He tensed, fearing violence-how would he fight a devil in a foreign place, with no weapon and no friends?-but the devil laughed. “You walked through a door you had never seen before, in a place where you had reason to fear for yourself. Is that not so?”

“That’s true,” Remy said.

“True is a word I don’t much like,” the devil said. “So. That is a word. When one speaks of true, one is speaking of morality.”

Remy wasn’t sure what to make of this. “Ha!” the devil crowed. “A boy who knows when to keep his mouth shut. Would you like a way home?”

It waved a hand and the door next to it opened. Through the doorway Remy could see the waterfront of Avankil. The Blackfall meandered, wide and lazy, past the quays. A smell of slack water drifted through the door, becoming one more of the smells Remy had not had time to disentangle from the overwhelming savor of Sigil.

“What’s it going to cost me?” Remy asked.

“You can either kill a man for me or agree to perform an unspecified deed at an unspecified time, which will be no more of a moral transgression than killing a man.” The devil grinned at Remy, clasping all of its hands together. “What say you?”

Remy thought about it. He was thirteen, old enough to know when someone was trying to put something over on him but not quite savvy enough to know what it was. At this moment he knew that no matter what his answer, he was likely to regret it later.

And he very badly wanted to go home.

The door to Avankil shut and disappeared. Only the wall, blank stone grimed with interplanar soot, remained. The devil’s grin spread until Remy thought its head might separate along an invisible axis defined by the meeting point of its upper and lower teeth. “There will come a time when an adventure-minded boy such as yourself might do me a great service. Here.” She held out a hand, palm up. In the center of her palm was a single gold coin.

Remy took it, fearing the consequences if he did not. The moment he lifted it from her palm, the devil vanished. He looked at the coin. It was a perfect featureless disk, with no face of king or emperor on its face.

Remy wandered Sigil until his legs were heavy and his tongue thick. Once a merchant of glass jars offered him a drink of water, but he was afraid to take it. He looked down at the stones of the street and wondered how many different worlds they had come from. Something was coming loose in his head as fatigue took him over. He was unmoored, as Sigil itself was unmoored. Remy was everywhere at once. He was afraid of never finding his way home and afraid to ask anyone where the way home might be.

From the fog inside his head shone a sudden clear realization. If he did not take control, he was never going to find his way out of Sigil. Looking around, Remy saw other wanderers. How long had they been there? One of them, a hunchbacked dwarf woman with long braids tucked into her boots, caught his eye. She knew, Remy thought. She knew him for what he was. She was telling him not to make the error she had made.

He was in a darkened stretch of street. Ahead, several streets crashed together into a broad square, alive with light and smoke. Remy headed for it. He would either find his way home or… for the first time, he realized that he could make his way here, in Sigil, just as he could in Avankil.

All of the worlds were here, each behind a door. Sigil was not a prison; he was not lost there; it was a gate standing open before him. All he had to do was walk through. Remy had good shoes on his feet and a good knife in his belt. He could go anywhere. He would go everywhere. Some men looked for Sigil their entire lives without finding it. Remy had fallen in and now, he was thinking, he didn’t want to climb out. “Pelor with me,” he said softly, and turned to face the next door he saw.