Alex Irvine - The seal of Karga Kul

“This whole thing has been madness,” Paelias said.

“We run the rapids,” Biri-Daar said. “It’s too late to do anything else.”

Vokoun surprised Remy then. Rather than refusing, or arguing, he shrugged and signaled the oarsmen. “Very well!” Vokoun said. “For dying, one day’s as good as the next.”

He might have said more, but the sound of the rapids reached them, and there was nothing else to say.

The moon was almost directly overhead. In its waxing glow, the rapids of the lower Whitefall glowed a nearly incandescent violet. The ten adventurers on the boat could have linked arms and spanned the distance from canyon wall to canyon wall-and the river itself was narrower yet by twenty feet of fallen boulders and gravel. Half a mile upstream, the river was more than a hundred feet wide. Squeezed down to one third of its width, it surged and boomed over rocks the size of houses, with the walls spray-wetted for twenty feet above the river’s surface. Vokoun’s boat moved faster as if chasing the current ahead. “Oars in the water!” he cried. Remy and Obek looked at each other, not knowing what he meant; simultaneously they looked at the two surviving halfling oarsmen, both of whom were dragging their oars at an angle away from the boat. Remy did the same, and the boat swung into the center of the channel, drawn by the pull of the water piling over itself into the first chute of the rapids.

Remy had always lived on flat water, the Blackfall Estuary that stretched miles wide away from quays of Avankil. He had never seen rapids like these. The water ahead, as far as he could see under the moonlight, was white foam intermittently broken by darkness that could be either water or stone. Vokoun leaned out over the bow. Paelias was up next to him; the halfling called out something Remy couldn’t understand and Pealias looked back. “Row!” he shouted. “Row, for your lives!”

We want to go faster? Remy wondered. But the halflings were digging into the water, and they had survived this run before. He dug in, and saw Obek doing the same. The boat leaped forward again, and just as quickly swung sideways. Without warning Remy and Obek were on the downstream side of the boat. The halflings dug hard, trying to straighten out the boat as Obek and Remy dragged their oars. The boat started to pivot back-and an unseen rock tore the oar from Obek’s hands. He lunged after it, overbalancing and dragging the downstream gunwale perilously close to the water level. Vokoun was shouting something that Remy couldn’t hear. Remy hauled back on Obek, barely holding onto his own oar with one hand as he tangled the other in Obek’s belt. “Back in the boat!” Biri-Daar and the Halflings were screaming as Remy leaned back into the boat’s middle and Obek hung over the edge grasping vainly after the oar that had already vanished into the darkness. Vokoun and Keverel joined the clamor as Biri-Daar got a grip on one of Obek’s legs. The tiefling, knowing the oar was lost, was trying to get back in, but he had nothing to grasp and if he reached back his face dipped into the water.

“High side!” Vokoun screamed again and again.

The boat swung so close to a group of boulders that Remy could have reached out and touched them, had he a free hand-but Obek, closer yet to the rocks, shoved the boat away with both hands and used the same shove to arch himself back, getting just enough of his weight close enough to the boat that Remy and Biri-Daar could haul him the rest of the way in. “Row! Row! High side!” Vokoun and Paelias screamed.

Remy and Obek flung themselves up and across the width of the raft, bringing it back to level with a crash and fountain of spray. Some of their gear went overboard, but in the dark Remy couldn’t tell what it was. After that everything was the roar of cold water over black stone, the sting of spray, the ache and tremble of muscles fighting the current. Remy slowly felt himself turning into a sort of golem, rowing when Paelias yelled row and doing anything else only when told… a rowing golem, made to move boats through dangerous mazes of broken stone and surging water. Spasms racked his back. His hands were partly numb and partly torn with blisters that broke, bleeding onto the oar and into the water. Yet he rowed when he was told. Beside him Obek tried to row with his shield, his harsh devilish features set in a mask of angry determination.

Everyone began to scream. Remy could not hear what they were saying. He looked up and saw that the entire river was pouring into a single chute, narrow enough that the boat turned sideways would dam it up, the water charging up the rock walls that bound it in tongues of spray taller than the obelisks at Crow Fork Junction. The boat seemed, incredibly, to rise as it rode the cresting volume of the river through this choked-off throat-Remy thought, in his exhausted golem’s haze, of a rope swing that hung from a long cypress branch over a deep pool just upstream of Avankil’s old city walls. When you swung, there was a moment of perfect stillness as you reached the top of your arc; the river spread below like a sheet of tin on cloudy days, like a blazing mirror when the sun shone; and you fell endlessly until you broke its surface and plunged through the deeper and deeper shades of greeny brown, the cold of the Blackfall’s deepest belly just reaching your feet before you again hung suspended, weightless, and began to kick to the surface with burning lungs and schemes aborning about how to cut in line to do it again faster, sooner next time…

And in the next moment they were gliding across the unbroken glassy surface of a deep, wide pool. The sound of the rapids was already fading. The boat turned in a slight eddy, finding its way to slack water in the shadow of a sheer rock wall that disappeared straight down into the depths. Remy reached out his oar to push the boat away from the wall. “Row,” Vokoun said. His voice, worn down to a deathbed wheeze, lacked its usual commanding tone… but they rowed. The boat heeled around and pointed downstream again.

By dawn, they were in a stretch of river that Remy would have sworn was just upstream of Avankil, in a region known as the Striped Bank. There the steep hills on either side of the river, and looming steeply over the tributaries that ran cold and fast down from the hills, were horizontally streaked in fantastic shades that Remy had only otherwise seen in the frozen sherbets mixed in the keep for Philomen and others in the nobility of Avankil.

Here, too, the streaks in the canyon cut were visible, and in similar colors; and also here, the river itself ran smoothly between them, even if the smaller streams that fell into it tumbled over themselves in their eagerness. But downstream, Remy knew, was not Avankil but Karga Kul. They fled toward it with death knights on their trail, and Erathis only knew what other minions of Orcus.

Erathis. He had sworn by Erathis.

It was dawn. The rising sun picked out the colors in the canyon walls, blinding Remy with beauty on this morning he had not expected to live to see… and he was invoking another god. Empty of feeling, he examined this problem. Why had it happened? Would it happen again?

“Keverel,” he said, but when the cleric looked his way Remy knew he could not say more about the true nature of the conflict he felt.

“Remy.”

A long time passed. Keverel did not press him and the boat was silent. After the previous evening and night, none of them had much to say. Obek rowed with his shield until Vokoun told him to stop. “Remy can row worth the two on the other side-not,” he was quick to add, “because they’re halflings, but because they’re lazy. Too lazy even to be killed by death knights when there’s someone else who can do that for them.”

They rowed in the dawn, until the sun shone over the diminishing canyon walls and Remy knew that whatever had come before, he was about to see the famed towers of Karga Kul. Paelias and Vokoun keeping lookout at the bow for snags and sandbars. After some time Remy said, “Philomen sent them, didn’t he?”