Alex Irvine - The seal of Karga Kul

“Wait,” Remy said. “Philomen. Why do I need to give you the chisel?”

Philomen’s eyes narrowed. “You stand on a very thin edge, Remy. A word from me and you go into Thanatos. Mortals do not return from thence.”

Remy brandished the chisel. “This is what you want,” he said.

“Remy, you mustn’t,” Uliana said. Biri-Daar reached out to him; Remy flinched away.

He faced down the vizier. “Philomen, mortals do not return from Thanatos. Do chisels?”

In Philomen’s face, Remy saw that he was right. “You want the chisel for yourself. If it goes into the Abyss, you’ll never see it again.”

Philomen drew himself up. “Boy. This bravado of yours will fade quickly when you find yourself looking into the face of Orcus.”

The sneering Remy could have stood. The threats were nothing new. But after what he had done during the past weeks, after the betrayal and the bravery, the horrors and the magnificence of the comrades in whose company he had fought his way across the Dragondown… he was not a boy, and would not be called one.

“Boy?” he repeated.

Pivoting, he drove the chisel like a knife through the slack face of the nearest demon. Its skull burst like a rotten fruit and it dropped without a sound. “Boy?” Remy said again. He kicked the demon, rolling it over. “I am no boy to lead by the nose and leave in the wastes to die. Not anymore.”

Another kick sent the demon, and the chisel protruding from its head, over the edge of the portal slab and into the midnight fires of Thanatos.

Philomen said nothing aloud, but Remy’s mind lit afire with necrotic agony as the demon-beholden vizier, once a man and now a death priest hierophant, smote him to his knees. The invading demons sprang back into action and from deep inside the agonized reaches of his brain, Remy heard the sounds of desperate battle. He looked up into the looming maw of a hezrou, the size of a troll-and three arrows, one after another, thwocked into the side of its head. Galvanized, Remy sprang back from its fall, which shook the portal slab. His sword was in his hand and a battle surged around him, tilting and swaying the slab as the combatants ebbed and flowed across its invisible axis.

A flash, gone in an eyeblink but brighter than the sun for the moment of its existence, closed Remy’s eyes. He turned to see what had happened; the talons of a hopping vrock raked down his back; he swung blindly, felt the blade of his sword grate along bone, and saw that Uliana had unleashed some force…

She had brought down the lightning. A thousand feet underground, Uliana had brought down the lightning. Demons lay blackened and unmoving all around. It was, Remy saw, as if the spell she had invoked to protect him from the evistro was a bee sting. Even Philomen staggered-and staggered again as Paelias began to work his fey magic, weaving a thicket of living thorns around the hierophant’s legs. It grew; Philomen killed it with a necrotic touch; it began to grow again. Obek leaped out onto the portal slab, bringing it for a moment nearly level. A plan presented itself to Remy. It depended on a great many things going right-in other words, on luck… “Paelias!” he cried. “It’s luck we need!”

“And luck you shall have!” the star elf cried in return, the silvery and lethal charms of the fey flicking from him like raindrops to dazzle and weaken the demonic foes. Turning his attention back to Philomen, Paelias called out a charm in the liquid Elvish of the eladrin-Lucan, his bowstring broken, and rushed across to join the melee, snapped his head around, eyes widening at the audacity of his eladrin cousin-and Remy felt a reckless flood of certainty.

Yes. It was daring. It was bold. It would work. Paelias had stolen the hierophant’s luck. It was the great trick of the fey warlocks, dangerous and fickle. There was no telling how long it would last.

Philomen turned to the star elf. “O fey,” he chided. “You would have my luck? We are far past the time when luck could save you.”

Seething necrotic energy arced out from Philomen’s staff and struck Paelias down, the tatters of the eladrin’s fey aura swirling away into the darkness. Keverel fought back, his mace crunching into the vizier’s back, but it was too late. With a wail Paelias covered his face with his hands and pitched over on his side, his legs scissoring along the floor. A hulking goristro demon fell upon him, heedless of Lucan’s arrows-and Remy was too far away.

Paelias had known luck would not save him, Remy thought. That is why he handed it off to me. The footloose eladrin, unwelcome among his own, had died saving the lives of strangers.

Remy charged toward Philomen, the agony of betrayal too much to bear-but luck intervened. A vrock scrabbling through the opening between worlds caught the hem of Remy’s tunic in its beak. He lost his balance on the angled surface of the portal slab, and fell. The vrock raised a talon; he parried it; the vrock let go his tunic and bit into Remy’s shoulder, the hooked tip of its beak punching through armor and muscle straight to the bone. With the hilt of his sword he hammered at the side of its head, again and again, breaking its beak and then shattering its skull. It fell limp and he kicked it back through the gap whence it had come.

“The seal, Remy!” Biri-Daar called. “Now!”

Remy ran to help. Reaching the corner of the seal nearest him, he dropped his sword and found purchase for his hands in the grooves of the deeply cut runes. The magic pouring from them tingled in his fingertips; the wound in his shoulder pained him less, although still terribly. With every pull on the seal, the muscle in his shoulder tore a little more.

The floor of the chamber was polished to a fine gloss, and the seal too was smoothed by the attentions of long-dead artisans. It moved much more easily than a stone of its weight should have… until it hit the raised lip at the edge of the tilted portal slab. “Lift,” Remy said through gritted teeth-not to Biri-Daar, stronger than he was, but to his shoulder, which screamed out in his head as he bent his legs and strained upward with everything he had. The seal came up off the ground.

Around them the battle surged, Lucan and Keverel and Uliana and the recovered Knights of Kul arrayed against a host of demons that grew with every moment. Uliana’s greatness, Remy realized, would never be known. She brushed aside the demons like flies, destroying them with a thought. Only Philomen was a worthy opponent for her.

And she was slowly, surely, getting the better of him as well. He could draw on the strength of Thanatos, on the awful power of the Demon Prince of the Undeath-but she drew on the power of the very stones from which the city of Karga Kul had been hewn, the unknown thousands of years that men had struggled to keep the demonic hordes from overrunning the mortal plane. All of that-all of what made Karga Kul, Karga Kul-was with her. Philomen struck at her with necrotic horrors, visions of the damned; she struck back with the elemental rage of mountain and sky. Keverel, the holy man of Erathis, fought with her, the strokes of his mace and strength of his faith slowly taking their toll. In Uliana’s remaining eye shone the grim and somehow ecstatic determination of the warrior who knows that she will not survive the day, but knows too that a more important enemy will die with her.

The Knights of Kul killed and killed, also knowing that they were to die. So brave, Remy thought, seeing one of them at last overrun by a swarm of evistros, killing them even as they tore the life from his body. Let me be worthy of that bravery and that sacrifice. And Paelias’s sacrifice of luck.

It was a prayer of sorts, and whether any god heard it-Pelor or Corellon or Erathis or any other-the act itself restored Remy’s resolve and strength. With Biri-Daar on the corner of the seal nearest him, Remy braced his feet on the other side of the raised lip of the portal slab, hauling the seal out over it as Obek pushed from behind and the Knights of Kul gave their lives for their city and the honor of their order. But still the slab and the seal did not meet flush, and the sigils began to flicker. The magic, given its potency by fleshly sacrifice, faded just as fleshly life did-only much faster. “To me, Knights!” Biri-Daar called out, and the four remaining Knights of Kul leaped to her, seeing at once what needed to be done.