Alex Irvine - The seal of Karga Kul

It had no knob, no latch, no visible hinge. What it did have was a slot in the exact center. Next to the door stood a tall and bulbous humanoid who looked as if it had been constructed of potatoes. “The Lady of Pain desires that you leave now,” it said. Roots curled around its mouth and its eyes were black cavities that Remy would have cut out of any potato he saw in a kitchen. Even its breath smelled of root cellars and freshly turned earth.

“No,” Remy said. “I am going to…”

“Perhaps Sigil will welcome you another time.” The potato-man smiled and gestured to the door.

Already Remy was aching for the lost opportunity of Sigil. If only he hadn’t waited, if only he had seized the chance when he’d had it instead of running around like a child looking for his mother.

“Young man,” the potato-man said. “You are awaited elsewhere.”

I could carve you into chips, Remy thought. But he walked to the door and put the demon’s coin in the slot.

And his hand came away damp from the condensation on the inside of the basement room’s one stone wall.

Outside, in the Avankil street where Remy had fled the gang, the normal voices and sounds of the city echoed from storefront to storefront. From the floor above, he heard a man and a woman arguing. Home.

Remy sniffed at his sleeve. Earth, smoke, sulfur, perfumes distilled from plants that grew nowhere on this world…

Sigil!

“Quite a tale, lad,” Vokoun said. “Either there’s depth to your character or a liar’s skill in your tongue.”

Obek clapped Remy on the shoulder, and in the same motion prevented him from leaning forward with a retort to Vokoun’s provocation. “A tale-teller’s skill,” Obek said. “I’ve been to Avankil. What else do these boys have to do when they’re lying around the docks with the rats all day?”

Laughter erupted around the fire, and Remy took the joke in good humor. Coming from Obek it was easier. There was no deceit in him. Nor was there any malice. Tieflings were notorious for both, which either made Obek unusual for his race or meant that the other citizens of the Five Cities didn’t know tieflings very well. “Crow Fork Market reminded me a little of it, but I didn’t want to say anything.”

“Wise,” Lucan commented. “We barely believe you now. Then, before we’d seen you in action, we’d never have taken you seriously.”

“I wasn’t even there, and I can agree with that,” Paelias agreed.

“Is it true?” Vokoun said.

Remy nodded, looking into the depths of the fire. He fancied he could see a tiny salamander, a scout from the Elemental Planes sent to see if the suddenly exposed chisel was of interest to the elemental powers… then it was gone. “Yes,” he said. “It’s true. I’ve never seen it since. I would like to go there again.”

“The Lady of Pain has walking potatoes for servants?” Vokoun looked as if that, more than anything else, was impossible to believe.

“I don’t know what he was, really,” Remy said. “That’s what he looked like, though.”

“The part that worries me is the devil giving you a coin,” Biri-Daar said. Remy looked at her and could see her measuring him yet again, deciding where his obligations lay, and his loyalties. The story disturbed her, he could tell. It disturbed him as well; how was he to know whether some kind of spell or curse had been placed on him?

“Paelias,” Remy said.

The star elf held up a hand. “Biri-Daar,” he said, “devils have many reasons for doing what they do. There is no taint of the Abyss on Remy, save the chisel.”

“How much more do you need?” Obek joked.

“Silence,” Biri-Daar said. “We weigh the success of our quest here, and the survival of Karga Kul. It is no time for jokes.”

“Every time is a time for jokes,” Obek shot back. “Especially the most serious times.” His sword sang out of its scabbard and hung perfectly level, its point an arm’s length from Remy. “So. Do we kill the boy and take the chisel ourselves? Do we kill the boy and destroy the chisel? Or do we quit this arguing and go on to do what needs to be done?” At each question, Obek turned the blade of his sword, walking the gleam of firelight up and down its length. “Me, I just need to get back into Karga Kul. Whatever makes that happen faster, I am for.”

“Put up your sword, tiefling,” Biri-Daar said evenly.

He looked at her. “I am called Obek.”

After a pause, Biri-Daar took her hand from the hilt of her own sword. “Put up your sword, Obek,” she said.

The blade flashed once more as Obek reversed and sheathed it. “There,” he said. “Done. Now let us go to Karga Kul.” Then he looked at Remy, who had not moved during the whole exchange. “Joke, my friend. It was a joke. No one was ever going to get killed.”

Maybe not, Remy thought. But he also thought that Obek was going to be in for a surprise if he ever came after Remy seriously. Remy wasn’t a Quayside urchin anymore, or even the vizier’s messenger. Somewhere along the Crow Road, he had become a warrior.

They pushed out into the lively current of the Whitefall an hour after sunrise the next morning, Vokoun at the tiller whistling an elf melody. The river was narrow and fast but mostly flat for the day, he said. “Just one bit of white water to get through, past the crook below Vagnir’s Ledge.”

“Sounds like there’s a story in that name,” Remy commented. He was just behind Vokoun, enjoying the feel of the boat on the water. The rest of the party was clustered closer to the middle of the boat, trying to stay out of the oarsmen’s way.

“There’s a story in every name,” Vokoun said. “Most of them aren’t worth telling.”

The story of Vagnir’s Ledge, Remy found out later, concerned a suicidal dwarf and a chance encounter with a griffon, after which the dwarf became a legendary hero among his people-who inhabited the caves along that part of the canyon. But before Remy ever heard that story, he and the rest of the group very nearly ran afoul of those dwarves’ ancient enemies.

After a full day of riding the river, monotony broken only by the occasional nibble of a fish on the hooks they trailed behind the boat, they tied up to a leaning oak tree, its branches spreading a good fifty feet out over the water and its roots exposed at the river’s edge. “In ten years it’ll be a snag,” Vokoun said.

“In ten years, you might be a snag too.” Paelias jumped nimbly from the boat up to a low-hanging branch and swung into the tree. The rest of the non-halfling passengers disembarked onto the shore while the crew made the boat fast and cleaned out the day’s trash. They clustered in a flat crescent at the base of a wooded mountainside, with the sound of a stream nearby and the forest canopy alive with the energetic songs of birds. “This would be a fine place to settle,” Paelias said from his perch.

Some of the halflings hopped out of the boat and set to work building a fire at the shoreline. “Someone’s been here before, and didn’t like it,” one of them said, holding up a skull.

“Maybe not such a fine place to settle,” Remy said. He and Lucan scanned the edges of the clearing.

Keverel examined the skull while the halflings finished laying the fire. “Whoever this was, a blade killed him, and not two years ago,” he said. Something crashed in the woods, some distance above them. The sun was low; already it was dusk in the trees and on the water, and the light falling on the other side of the Whitefall’s canyon was darkening to orange.

More crashing from the trees put them all on guard. Vokoun and the four halfling rowers cocked small crossbows and clustered together. Remy drew his sword and heard the creak of Lucan’s bowstring. “Erathis,” Keverel murmured, and at the invocation of the god a dim glow spread from the edge of the woods. Remy could see it playing along the edges of swords and the curves of helmets. But it was not men they were going to fight.