Alex Irvine - The seal of Karga Kul

They came down on the edge of the slab, forcing it down level with the floor-and the luck fled. Fleeing vrock demons, seeing their last chance, dropped from the darkness above, their sudden weight enough to pitch the slab over to an opposite angle. The seal hung out over the gap created by the tilt. Biri-Daar was left dangling at the end of the Seal, and Remy scrambled back from the sudden appearance of the endless, despairing waste of Thanatos spread out below him. The vrocks scrambled through the gap and were gone… all except one.

It craned its vulture’s neck and bit down on Biri-Daar’s leg. She growled and kicked at it with her other leg. It flapped its great wings and tugged, adding its two claws to the grip on her leg.

The seal began to overbalance and slid, grinding along the edge of the hole between the mortal plane and the infernal Thanatos.

Remy saw it all happening before it happened. Biri-Daar looked up at the seal as she felt it shift. She looked down at the vrock. She looked up into the darkness, toward the towers of Karga Kul that whitely reflected sunlight far above in a world that-Remy realized as Biri-Daar looked back down, and over, and directly at him-she would never see again.

She let go at the vrock’s next tug, and was gone through the infernal gap. Remy cried out, wordless and anguished, lunging for her-but she swung a powerful arm and knocked him away, his extended hand just brushing and tugging at her breastplate and down the length of the arm that shoved him back. Biri-Daar fell, eyes open, sword out, killing the vrock even as its companions swooped up from the black crags and Remy lost sight of her, the world lost sight of her. He scrambled back toward the center of the portal slab, still screaming even as he felt the slab’s inexorable swing, and it closed against the Seal with a boom that rolled up into the invisible heights of the chamber and out into the ends of the hall, far above in the quiet space of the council chamber of the decimated Mage Trust.

Uliana died knowing that the Seal was restored. Paelias, bluish pallor seeping into the skin around his mouth, lay dead near the figure of Philomen, who was on hands and knees.

Remy approached the vizier. There was something in his left hand. He looked at it and put it in the pouch where for the last weeks he had carried the chisel. Then he looked down at the drawn, corrupt face of his former mentor. This, he thought, is the man who got me out of Avankil. For that, despite everything else, I owe him a debt.

“Would the monks at the Monastery of the Cliffs have killed me?” he asked. “If I had lived to reach them? Or would they have taken me to the Road-builder themselves? How did you imagine me dying, Philomen?”

“You did not have all the luck,” Philomen said. “Boy.”

Wordlessly Remy ran him through, leaving his sword where it stood at an angle out from the ribs of the desiccated corpse of the man who had given Remy his first job. But that was when he had still been a boy. He looked around. “Lucan,” he said.

The elf was kicking over the corpses of demons and killing whichever of them stirred. “Remy.”

“Where’s Obek?”

“Here,” came the tiefling’s voice from the other side of the Seal. “Who do you think kept pushing when you were out on the carousel there?” Obek came into view-their light was much diminished, and Remy could barely see him until Keverel, his voice hoarse with exhaustion, invoked the name of his god one last time, the word Erathis spreading through the chamber, bringing light to the shadows.

“Philomen,” Keverel mused. “Vizier of Avankil.” He walked to the vizier’s body, rolled the staff along the floor with his foot, prodded the many sashes and pouches of the vizier’s robe. “It is a very dark day. Biri-Daar was the greatest of the Knights of Kul. Her memory may yet restore the order to the greatness that is its rightful legacy.” The cleric’s gaze roved over the carnage in the Chamber of the Seal, and came to rest on the Seal itself. “This is now the tomb of Biri-Daar,” he said. “Though few will ever see it.” He made a gesture of blessing over the seal, and it seemed incongruous to Remy, who had seen what lay beneath the floor.

Keverel saw him looking, and must have read the expression on Remy’s face. “Blessings are not for those places that are already holy,” he said. “Surely you have learned this now.”

“Learning,” Obek said. “I am sick of learning. Let us go away from this place to somewhere else, a place where there is nothing to learn.”

The four of them were coming closer to each other, not intending it so but under the power of an impulse to draw together, the four survivors of a journey long and treacherous. “You did well, tiefling,” Lucan said.

“Oh, praise from the elf,” Obek said. He looked at the Seal and at the body of Paelias. “None of us did well enough.”

“But we did,” Keverel said. “Karga Kul stands, and will stand. That, at least, we have done.”

They were quiet for a long while after that, in the glow of Erathis that silvered the bodies of the living and the dead.

The sun on the Dragondown Gulf did as much as anything could to dispel the memories of what had happened inside the cliff. Remy looked up from Cliff Quay. “It’s time to leave this place for a while. There will be unrest in the absence of power,” he said. “The Mage Trust is dead. The seal is restored. Enemies remain. Our victory is partial.”

On Remy’s other side, Obek and Lucan leaned against the railing of a pier, looking not up at the city but down at the ship they were about to board. They were paying in gold for their passage south to the Cape of Toradan, where the city of that name still stood looking out over the waters of the Dragondown Gulf. Remy considered that he had seen two of the Five Cities. Toradan would be the third, Toradan whose native sailor sang to raise a wind to bring them home more quickly: Spires of Toradan, spires of Toradan Let the golden fires of the sun On your rooftops guide me home

Remy regarded the gold-filigreed fragment of eggshell in his palm. He had it from a paladin of Bahamut, one of the great leaders of the Order of the Knights of Kul. He shook out the chain and looked at the broken links. Any jeweler in Toradan would be able to repair it. The boat rocked and groaned in rhythm with the swells on the outer Cape Kul, and Remy turned his mind forward, to Toradan. Avankil would no longer be safe for him. Like Biri-Daar, perhaps, he was growing into a citizen of the Dragondown; all of this land’s mystery, wonder, and danger were his to explore.

Philomen’s agents survived-in Avankil, and Toradan, and in the Monastery of the Cliff. The threats that lay below and behind the visible world were still dangerous. But where there were threats, there was adventure. And glory.

And, of course, the treasures of lost civilizations whose remains were everywhere… if one knew how to look. Remy saw Obek and Lucan gambling with another pair of passengers, and Keverel looking out over the bow into the limitless reaches of the gulf beyond the harbors. These three, and four more who had died along the way, had begun to teach Remy to see.

The world would yet teach him more.

The coffers of Karga Kul had produced a handsome price in gemstones for the staff of Philomen. The vizier’s other treasures included a ring Remy wore on his right hand index finger. Lucan said it was a ring that brought luck. Remy thought that he had seen how luck operated in the last moments of Paelias’s life, and wasn’t sure he wanted more luck around. He’d always survived with the luck he’d been born with.

But the ring was his, and in the pouch where he had carried the chisel, next to Biri-Daar’s gilded eggshell, Remy carried a drawstring bag filled with more money than he had ever seen in one place in his life. His first impulse when Lucan had given him his share had been to give it back, to say that the lives of his comrades were not worth gems and gold.