The Seal of Karga Kul: A Dungeons & Dragons Novel

by Alex Irvine

  “And by this point, crossing it is no longer a matter of choice,” Keverel chimed in.

  “Is that so,” Kithri began. She saw Keverel pointing back up the road, turned to see what he was indicating, and saw—as Remy did at that exact moment—the band of tieflings standing in the road behind them. As they watched, the band of perhaps a dozen was fortified with ten times as many hobgoblin marauders.

  Remy had seen fewer tieflings than dragonborn. The dragonborn in Avankil had their clan hall, and conducted business when they had business to conduct. The city’s tieflings, perhaps sensitive to the permanent stain on their heritage, kept to themselves when they could. When they dealt with non-tieflings, their bravado and short tempers resulted in vexed interactions. Everyone Remy had ever known, from Quayside toughs to Philomen the vizier himself, had warned him to steer clear of tieflings.

  Now here he was, his back to a pathway of rocks floating in midair, facing a large number of exactly those creatures he had been told his entire life to avoid. Remy touched the box hanging at his side and wondered what it might have contributed to this turn of events. He imagined that, if they survived the next hour, Lucan and the others might have similar questions.

  “It seems that some of these tieflings still believe they fight for Bael Turath,” Lucan observed.

  “And that we, somehow, wear the colors of Arkhosia,” Kithri added. “Well, we do have a dragonborn with us.”

  “It gets worse,” Lucan said.

  “I can hardly see how,” Kithri said.

  “I can,” Iriani said. “Out there on the bridge, see that? That is a cambion magus.”

  Something about his tone struck up a quiet, creeping fear in Remy’s mind. Iriani, who had faced down everything they had seen thus far without batting an eye, now paused. “Devil’s offspring,” Iriani said. “You must not speak to it. These magi have the gift of deceit. They would talk any of you right off the bridge.”

  “You’re assuming any of us are going on the bridge,” Kithri said. She was up on a rock at the very edge of the cliff, looking down into the gorge. “If,” she added, “you can call it a bridge. Whoever named it, I’m guessing, had never laid eyes on it.”

  “I read once that Iban Ja’s ghost lives inside one of the stones,” Keverel said. “One wonders whether he would be an ally or foe.”

  More tieflings and hobgoblins spilled from crevices in the canyon walls. “Time to find out,” Biri-Daar said. “Unless we’d rather fight our way through them and go back to Toradan.”

  “I think I would rather do that,” Kithri said. “But I also think you were making a bad attempt at a joke.”

  “And I think that your sense of humor is not nearly as well-developed as you assume,” Biri-Daar said. “Iriani. Let us go and rid the world of a cambion.”

  She leaped to the first block and crossed it in three steps. Iriani followed. As they stepped across the next gap, the hobgoblins gathered at the end of the road charged with a roar. Behind them, the tieflings cocked crossbows and fired, getting the range to the nearest part of the bridge. Kithri danced down the rock face to the edge of the scree, flicking a stream of daggers at the mass of hobgoblins before she made a running jump toward the first stone of Iban Ja’s bridge. She landed at the stone’s edge and tumbled, springing to her feet. Right behind her came Lucan, nocking and firing arrows with uncanny elf grace as he picked his way backward down the scree before firing off a last shot and turning to skip across the void to the stone.

  Shoulder to shoulder, Remy and Keverel backed their way toward the edge of the cliff, skirting the rim of the scree slope to the place Kithri had selected for her leap. “My ancestors were citizens of Bael Turath,” the cleric said. “We were one of the few families who refused to take part in the diabolical pact that created these tieflings. I do believe they would hold that against me if they knew.”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t tell them,” Remy said.

  The leaders of the hobgoblin charge reached them, four abreast; among them came tieflings as well, bearing the cruelly carved blades of their kind. “We should go,” Keverel said. “Remy.”

  “What?” Remy said, thinking the cleric was talking to him. He glanced to his left and saw that Keverel had spoken over his mace, which glowed briefly with a pale light before Keverel deflected the first tiefling’s swing and stove in its skull with a blow of his own. At the contact, Remy felt a surge of strength; his sword grew light in his hands; he flicked aside two wild attacks, pivoting between the pair of tieflings to hamstring one and sink the blade half-deep in the other’s back.

  A blow rang across the back of his helmet and Remy’s eyes swam. He heard the whistle of an arrow passing close and the gargled scream of an enemy trying to breathe into punctured lungs. The blows of Keverel’s mace, steady as the tolling of a bell, marked the time as they fought a slow retreat to the edge of the cliff, with Lucan and Kithri killing from distance while Biri-Daar and Iriani made their way ever closer to the cambion magus at the midpoint of the bridge.

  “Go,” Keverel said when they reached the edge. “You first.”

  Remy didn’t argue. It was in the cleric’s nature to send others first. He jumped, clearing the gap easily, and landed on his feet. Keverel was right behind him. As soon as they turned back to the cliff edge, the hobgoblins started to follow. Not all of them made the jump; some caught the edge of the stone and then slipped to fall screaming into the misty depths of the gorge. Others slipped or were pushed off the cliff face by the press of their charging comrades. The tiefling crossbowmen, abandoning the idea of Iban Ja’s bridge altogether, had started working their way up the sides of the canyon wall in search of shooting positions. One of them reached a ledge thirty feet or so above Kithri’s former perch. It was taking aim when Lucan noticed and picked it off.

  “That won’t be the last one,” he said. “We’re going to need to get out into the middle before too many more of them get up there.”

  From stone to stone they leaped. The larger ones moved not at all at the impact of mortal foot, but landing on the smaller ones was precarious because they dipped and tilted from the fresh weight. Remy quickly discovered that the old bits of cloth and their stakes were a reliable guide to a safe passage using stones of sufficient size, and he thanked all of the gods—not just Pelor—for the life and work of the unknown traveler who had set them there. “Hold them here for a moment,” Keverel panted as they gained an especially large block set at an angle to the rest, so that anyone wishing to make the leap onto it had to land on one corner. Remy and Keverel waited for Kithri and Lucan to make the jump with them. Together the four held back five times that number of hobgoblins.

  “Where do they all come from?” Kithri wondered aloud.

  Lucan loosed an arrow at something only he had seen, back toward the lip of the gorge. “The halls of the dwarves that lived in the gorge, I’d guess. It was one of the places their ancestors lived after they drove the dwarves out.” He nocked and fired another arrow. “Cambion back there, too.”

  “Still?” Kithri skipped off to one side for a better perspective.

  “No, was,” Lucan said. “But don’t be surprised if there are more of them spotted in among the tieflings here.”

  Behind them, Biri-Daar and Iriani were within fifty feet of the cambion magus. Landing after her most recent leap, the dragonborn faced the cambion magus and clashed her sword and shield together. “Make way and live, devil,” she said. “Or remain and die. It’s all the same to me.”

  The cambion spread his arms in a welcoming gesture. “After the battle,” he said, “I will find your head at the bottom of the gorge. I will place it next to my hearth and I will make it speak those words again and again.”

  Hellfire arced between the magus’s hands. Iriani landed alongside Biri-Daar on the first stone of the bridge as flames curled out of Biri-Daar’s nostrils. The thrill of battle burned through her. With an enemy before her, she knew who she was. Together they strode to the next gap and cle
ared it in a long step. They paused, waiting for the stone under their feet to stop rocking. Three stones remained between them and the cambion.

  “Quickly there!” Lucan called over his shoulder. Crossbow bolts were beginning to fall around them as the tieflings found the range. They were forced to give up their position, which meant giving up that entire block all at once; the moment they stepped back, hobgoblins leaped across and pursued them to the next gap. It turned into a sprint punctuated by reckless leaps across greater and greater gaps. Kithri slowed their pursuers down somewhat with a scattering of caltrops in their wake. A half-dozen hobgoblins pulled up with punctured feet, bogging down those that came behind until they were shoved out of the way.

  That gained them a full stone of distance, with two gaps. They turned and poured arrows, sling stones, and throwing knives into the front rank of their pursuers, slowing but not stopping them.

  Then out of the caves that lined the gorge, where once the tieflings of Bael Turath had undermined the great bridge, came the black wafting shapes of sorrowsworn.

  “I was afraid of this,” Iriani said. He and Biri-Daar were two jumps from the cambion magus. He had spent the trip drenching the two of them in every protective magic he could think of while they said their prayers to Corellon and Bahamut that the devil’s Abyssal magics would not overcome them.

  Now the sorrowsworn—three of them, surrounded by the flickering midnight torrent of what could only be shadowravens—meant that he was going to have to divide his attentions. With a sweeping gesture, Iriani erected a magical barrier that would slow the sorrowsworn. At the same time he looked back toward where his four companions were slowing the pursuit of the tieflings. “Sorrowsworn!” he cried out. “Keverel!”

  The cleric turned and saw the sorrowsworn. Immediately he dropped his shield to brandish his holy symbol of Erathis in their direction. “You slivers of death, fragments of the Shadowfell itself,” he intoned. “You haunters of battlefields, reapers of souls. You will not take those under the protection of Erathis!”

  At the god’s name, the rising sorrowsworn slowed. The brilliance of Keverel’s holy light held them back … but the shadowravens swarmed around the stones, looking for a way in.

  “Biri-Daar, finish this!” the cleric called. If the sorrowsworn got close, their trickery would get inside the mind of whoever they seized on first. They fed on despair and relished the final thoughts of the suicides they created. In the midst of a battle, one moment of distraction caused by uncertainty or remembered failure could be decisive. The sorrowsworn could not approach too near, but they could reach out and find one who might be prey to their wiles.

  In the same way wordly fire burned wood, the cambion’s magian fire was fueled by the soul. It raised its staff and Biri-Daar’s mouth opened in a scream as she felt the soulscorch burn through her. By her side, Iriani did the same—and both of them, strengthened by their gods and by the wordly powers of the cleric Keverel, survived the soulscorch and kept on. Iriani blew across his palm, and a film of ice appeared on the block where the cambion magus stood. It slipped, reaching out to break its fall and melt the ice with a fiery discharge. Steam masked it for a moment as the ice boiled away; when the gorge’s winds blew the steam away, Biri-Daar stood before it.

  It struck at her with fire. She struck back with steel. Again fire blazed from the cambion, washing over the dragonborn to leave her charred and smoking—and again she answered with a sword stroke, cracking its staff in two. The discharge of the staff’s hellish energy enveloped them both in a swirl of fire; when it faded, Biri-Daar opened her mouth and spat out a long tongue of her own fire.

  “You guessed wrong, devil,” she said, and struck the cambion magus down to its knees. Then she struck it again, bringing her sword down across its back and crushing it to the ancient stone of the bridge. The cambion magus lay still. Its blood spread black in the cracks of the stone. Biri-Daar kneeled to send it on its way.

  “Bahamut watches me as I prove myself worthy,” she growled, flames licking from her mouth. “Your masters turn their backs. Take that knowledge with you when you stand at hell’s gates and beg admission.”

  She stood and clashed sword and shield once more. “Tieflings of the gorge, your magus is dead!”

  A cry went up among the tieflings, yet still they pressed forward, driven by the hobgoblins behind and among them. Biri-Daar saw this and for the first time since Remy had known her, he saw uncertainty on her face. It lasted only a moment, and disappeared in a gout of fire as she threw her head back and roared. “To me!” she cried. “To the other side!”

  From stone to stone came the other four as Iriani held off the sorrowsworn, who were too fearsome an adversary to fight directly should they get near enough to use their life-stealing scythes. The Raven Queen, thought Iriani, still had an interest in this bridge even after all those years, the centuries since the fall of Arkhosia. Iriani’s power was a river like the Blackfall, turbulent, channeled only by the deep canyon walls of his will. And while he arrested the sorrowsworn’s deadly march, Iriani lost sight of the cambion magus after he saw Biri-Daar cut it down. He took it for granted that the magus was dead and that the tieflings would flee in disarray. One moment of uncertainty, of inattention. An old story, told again and again and never the less true for all of its repetitions.

  O wizard you have failed your companions, you have failed yourself, you have turned your back on the adversary while he still plots against you.

  The dying cambion magus harbored hopes of finding an afterlife in the Nine Hells that exceeded what it had found in the mortal realms. It had killed many and for years kept the bridge from being reborn as a path of commerce that might have united the cities of the Dragondown. Now, as the life drained from it and the black blood of its body spilled over the sides of the rock where it lay, disappearing into spray long before it found the roiling waters of the Noon a thousand feet below. The cambion magus knew that if it died there, the mortal interlopers would roll its body off the rock, to smash against the rocks or be torn to bits in the rapids. That was all right. He would stand before his infernal masters and claim that his deeds on the mortal plane merited rank and servants in the infernal realms.

  Fool.

  His final bit of proof would be this half-elf wizard who even now stood within arm’s reach, resolutely defying the charge of the sorrowsworn and the shadowravens who flocked about them.

  Fools die and you are a fool, first. You will die, and then because of you, all of your companions.

  The cambion’s mouth was dry. It had to speak the charm three times before making all of the sounds correctly. And then it knew that as the last syllable left its mouth that this final spell would kill it. There was no regret in this knowledge. The spell would kill another as well.

  The shadowravens boiled in a cloud around the stones of Iban Ja’s bridge, unable to approach because of Iriani’s protective charm and the energies of Erathis and Bahamut projected through Keverel and the paladin Biri-Daar. The six adventurers had slaughtered tieflings beyond counting, and the cambion magus charged with holding the bridge lay dying; the far side was nearly gained.

  Then Iriani looked down, toward the sorrowsworn, and his charms faltered. “No,” he said. He began to turn, his face a terrible mask of helpless realization and terror, but before he ever saw the magus again, the wizard Iriani immolated in a pillar of soulfire. It burst from the twin seats of the soul in head and heart, annihilating Iriani’s body in the time it took for his comrades to feel the heat. The cambion magus died knowing it had succeeded; Iriani died knowing he had been close, so close to delivering his comrades through to the next stage of their errand. As quickly as the blast of soulscorching fire appeared, it blazed out, leaving Iriani’s body unmarked but lifeless, to topple sideways onto the edge of the rock. The body rested there for a moment. Maybe it was the wind that took it in the end, or the heavy tread of a man or elf or hobgoblin fighting for its life that rocked the stone just enough. Or perh
aps the last escaping breath of an elf wizard named Iriani, native to the forests that blanket the mountains that give rise to the Whitefall on its course toward Karga Kul and the ocean, was enough to settle the body so that it tipped, bit by bit, over the edge. And fell.

  The cambion magus was dead and smiling. And the shadowraven swarm began to press closer.

  “Break!” screamed Biri-Daar. “To the far side! Run!”

  They ran, pursued by the last of the tieflings, slashing their way through shadowravens that cut them terribly with undead beak and talon. For the rest of his life Remy would remember the shadowraven talon that slashed along his forehead seeking his eyes. Through the spatter of his own blood he saw his sword cut through it, saw the blade tear the shadowraven into tatters of shadow that blew away in the winds of the gorge. They ran and leaped from stone to stone, finding the other side together, fighting the last of the tieflings as they scrambled up the ruined giant’s playground of fallen and tilted stone blocks that remained of that side of Iban Ja’s bridge.

  When they were across, the tieflings and hobgoblins fell back. Not just to the next stone away from the surviving portion of the bridge. They fell back stone by stone until they reached the exact center of the gorge. There they raised their swords and spears, clashing them on shield and roaring a song of victory.

  “Did they win?” Lucan panted. “I didn’t think they won.”

  “We’re here,” Biri-Daar. “But Iriani is not.”

  “I saw him fall,” Remy said.

  Kithri was nodding. “Me too. He was already dead.”

  Looking out over the mass of hobgoblins and tieflings, Biri-Daar said, “So should we be. The shadowravens do not follow, the sorrowsworn retreat to their lair. The rest come only halfway. Why?”

  Lucan was looking at the road that stretched ahead of them, from the lip of the gorge into a misty and forested middle distance. “I have a guess,” he said.