by Alex Irvine
The thing wrapped around his waist was a vine. Remy dug his heels into the earth and found his knife. He slashed at the vine until it snapped, and fell backward against the embankment of the Crow Road.
Suddenly the earth around him was alive with the vines—no, they were roots. And one of the great old trees at the edge of the road was moving. “Treant!” shouted Lucan. “A blackroot!”
Treants, those legendary guardians of the forests, were as vulnerable as other kinds of life to the undead transformations that occurred along the Crow Road. This one moved with the sound of crackling bark and the whisper of long-dead leaves that did not fall from its branches. The roots binding Remy dragged him toward it. “Behind it,” he called out as the rest of the group leaped off their horses. “There’s something behind it!”
From either side of the treant, sword wraiths appeared, their blades catching the moonlight. Remy struggled to draw his own sword but his arm was bound fast. All he could do was saw with his knife at the roots that drew him ever closer to the treant’s great fists, which would pound him into a bloody paste in the undergrowth.
If the sword wraiths didn’t kill him first.
Keverel was the first to reach him. Forbidden by his oaths to use bladed weapons, he lent his weight to Remy’s struggle against the roots, while raising his holy symbol high with one hand and calling out. “Back, spawn of the Shadowfell! By Erathis, you shall not have this boy!”
The wraiths paused and flitted smoothly away from Keverel, keeping Remy between them and the cleric. “We will have either him or what he carries, holy man,” one of them said. “Or perhaps both.”
“And perhaps we bring you along as well. The Shadowfell has delights for the mortal who denies himself worldly pleasures,” the other added. One of Lucan’s arrows passed right through it, wisps of black the only sign of its passage until it thunked into the trunk of the treant. Rumbling, the undead tree spirit took a step toward Remy.
Paelias landed next to Remy, sword drawn and ready to engage the wraiths. “You surely draw a lot of attention, youngling,” the eladrin said. His sword flicked out and was parried by one of the wraiths. “Lucan! Even the odds, mind?”
From the wraiths’ side, Lucan attacked, driving one of them into the other. Both glided out of his reach, but Paelias was watching the shadows and was ready when the first emerged from the shadowglide. His sword struck home, bringing a miserable screech from the wraith, whose return stroke caught only Paelias’s blade. Pressing his advantage, the eladrin struck again, and with a trailing scream the swordwraith vanished. Lucan awaited the other’s return from its shadowglide, looking hard for any trace of moongleam on its blade.
Biri-Daar thudded to the ground next to Keverel as the blackroot treant took another slow, implacable step forward. “I am loath to do this,” she said.
Landing next to her with flint and steel in one hand and an oil-soaked torch in the other, Kithri said, “If you let it squash Remy, it will probably go away.”
“Life is never that easy,” Biri-Daar said. She took a running step and leaped, new twin katars from Crow Fork Market reversed in her hands to use as improvised climbing axes. Below her, Kithri ignited her torch.
Lucan and Paelias backed slowly toward each other, keeping Remy and Keverel in the corner of their fields of vision. “You didn’t accidentally hit both of them?” Lucan asked.
Paelias shook his head. “Just the one. Might have killed it. Or whatever it is you do to finish a wraith.”
Then the second swordwraith appeared, all the way on the other side of Keverel, emerging from the shadows cast when Kithri lit her torch. She reared back and threw it at a knot of branches halfway up the treant’s trunk, on the side opposite where Biri-Daar slowly worked her way up to the suggestion of a face in the dead branches of its crown. It swatted at her but could not dislodge her, and the torch caught its bark on fire. Immediately the treant devoted all of its attention to putting out the flames; using the distraction, Biri-Daar reached the base of the crown, where its ears would have been if the treant had been human. Instead of ears it featured a knotted hole on either side, with a multitude of tiny branches sprouting like whiskers above and around it.
On the ground, the swordwraith’s blade flashed out to strike an unwary Kithri, who was striking flint over another torch—but with a clang, Keverel flung out his mace at the last moment, deflecting the blow. His protective blessing wavered and the swordwraith turned on him, slashing open his mail shirt and the flesh underneath.
Her torch lit, Kithri swung it around and swept it through the denser shadow of the swordwraith’s head. The flame bloomed up and down its body and its screech pierced the night, spurred to a higher pitch when a leaping Paelias landed next to the prone Keverel and dispatched it with a stroke of his sword.
All of them looked up at Biri-Daar then, as she drew a deep breath and put her beaked mouth to the blackroot treant’s ear.
She did not want to use fire. She did not want to burn the forest or destroy the spirits that lived therein. But she did very much want this blackroot treant to find death, to return to the soil that had given it life. All of that time spent with elves and rangers had made her too sensitive, no doubt—but whatever the cause, when Biri-Daar unleashed her dragonbreath into the knothole at the side of the blackroot’s head, she did so with more pity than anger.
Flames flared out through the great rotting holes of its eyes and mouth, roaring along with the agonized roar the blackroot made. Blindly it grasped at Biri-Daar, found her, flung her away into the trees—but too late, as the flames caught the dead leaves of its crown and exploded into a great mushroom of fire. The roots holding Remy spasmed, twisted, and fell limp. Kithri sawed them away from his legs with a knife. “Lucan! Paelias! Find Biri-Daar!” she yelled over the sound of the flames.
In the last moments of its undeath, the blackroot staggered back toward the forest where its roots had first found sustenance. Then, Remy saw, it caught itself, jerking back from the edge of the forest in a shower of embers. Turning, losing its balance as the life burned out of its long-dead heartwood, the blackroot took one great step—over him, over the moaning Keverel, over Kithri—onto the Crow Road. And when it had gotten both feet on the road, it fell, its roots and branches dying by inches, curling and blackening as the flames found every inch of what centuries before had been one of the noblest beings of the world.
“Did you see that?” Lucan said wonderingly. “It moved out of the trees.”
Kneeling over Keverel, Kithri said, “Lucan, don’t be an idiot. It was undead. It didn’t know where it was going.”
“You believe what you believe,” Lucan said. He looked over at Paelias, whose chiseled face bore the same expression of disbelief as his own. Both of them looked at Remy.
“I think I saw it too,” Remy said. “It stopped and turned around, didn’t it?”
“Go find Biri-Daar!” Kithri screamed. “Go!”
They went, not wanting to argue, even though they were fairly sure that Biri-Daar was all right. She had survived far worse than a short flight through tree branches.
And they were very sure that they had seen that night something that none of them might ever see again: an undead creature remembering, at the moment of its death, something of its long-gone living self.
Neither Lucan nor Paelias said anything about this as Biri-Daar limped out of the darkness before they had gotten a hundred paces away from the road. They fell into step with her, waiting to see if she needed help. She waved them away. “Sore is all,” she said. “I am tempted to believe that the other trees … treants, perhaps, but perhaps just trees … I am tempted to believe that they looked after me a little.”
“I believe it,” Lucan said. “After what I saw that blackroot do, I can believe anything.”
That night they were able to sleep a little, in the lee of a grassy knoll far enough from the road that the crows wouldn’t follow them all the way. “How much farther are we on this road?” Pae
lias asked. “Which of you have traveled it all the way?”
“All the way? None of us,” Lucan said. “I have been on part of it.”
“I too. As far as the Crow’s Foot at the Tomb Fork,” Biri-Daar said.
Paelias looked around. “Just the two of you,” he said. “And neither as far as this Inverted Keep. Interesting. Well, I’ll take the first watch and perhaps in the morning one of the crows will bring us a map.”
In the morning, while they brewed tea and toasted bread, Remy said, “Would the crows do that? I mean guide us.” Keverel was slicing jerked meat. He paused and looked at Lucan.
“Interesting,” he said. “Would they?”
Lucan chuckled. “My guess is that I have no idea. I’ll give it a try.”
They waited as Lucan walked closer to the road and whistled out to the crows. Two of them flapped down into a dead tree closer to him. Remy watched as the crows bobbed their heads at Lucan. He pointed down the road, made a circular motion in the direction of the sun. After a few minutes, the crows flew back to their stations at the tops of the nearest trees. Lucan walked back toward the camp and the crows began to caw.
“They’re just sentries,” he said. “They’re descended, or say they are, from the crows buried along this part of the road, which according to them originally came from a clan that lived on the edge of the elves’ forest near the Gorge of Noon. Who knows whether it’s true.
“But they also said that they thought it was five more days to the Crow’s Foot, and a day after that to the Inverted Keep. I’m not sure how clear their ideas are about how far we can go in a day.”
“Not far enough,” Kithri sighed. “Is there water on the way?”
“Odd you should mention that. The crows said that the last day or so of the trek would be through a swamp.” Lucan squatted by the fire and poured tea. “They don’t like the swamp. They wouldn’t say why, but it was clear they didn’t like the swamp at all.”
“Well, I love swamps,” Paelias said brightly.
Keverel snorted. “Gods,” Kithri said. “You made the cleric laugh. Either this will be a great day or we will all die.”
Saddled up and back on the road, they watched the crows watch them for that day and the next. The Crow Road leveled out and traversed a broad landscape of naked granite and clear water, punctuated occasionally by twisted pines festooned with observant crows. “So,” Remy said when they had ridden the entire day without incident. “I’m starting to feel unusual because nothing has happened.”
“You mean nobody besieging us because they want your box?” Kithri said.
“Or undead spirits wanting to drag us down below the stones, to transform us into ghouls and wights.” Keverel smiled thinly. There had been too much of that in the reality of their days for it to carry much humor.
“When we get to the Inverted Keep, what are we going to find?” Remy asked.
“I don’t know.” Biri-Daar looked at the clouds gathering to the northeast. “I’ve never seen it except from the other side of the Whitefall. And I have never spoken to anyone who has been in the Keep and returned.”
“What do you know?” Paelias. “Every time someone asks you something, O dragonborn leader, you tell us what you don’t know.”
“What do I know?” Biri-Daar repeated. “I know that the Inverted Keep hangs hundreds of feet in the air over the Whitefall, and that the way into it involves a way underground through the tomb of the Road-builder. I know that he transformed himself in some way, and presides over the Keep as he has done for centuries. I know that …” She faltered.
They rode in silence until she was ready to speak again.
“I know that there is a dragonborn there. One of my ancestors,” Biri-Daar said quietly. “I know that one of the Guardians of the Quill is there. That …” Again she trailed off and again she mastered herself. “That will not be so once we have come and gone.”
None of them knew what to say. Remy watched the dragonborn who had led them this far, and he understood more about how and why she did what she did.
“I will find Moidan’s Quill, and bring it out, and we will take the quill to Karga Kul,” Biri-Daar said. She said it to the sky but meant them to hear it. “The Mage Trust of Karga Kul will use the quill to reinscribe the seal and replenish its power. There are too few points of light in the world,” Biri-Daar went on, and her voice broke. “Karga Kul is one of them. It is also my home though I have not been there in many years. I would not have it drown in the chaos of the Abyss.”
If someone had asked him to list five things he thought he would never see, Remy would have put seeing a dragonborn cry high on the list. And he would have put tears from Biri-Daar at the top of any list. The paladin cried silently and without motion, riding forward with no change in her pace or expression. “It occurs to me,” Lucan said, “that if all of us chose to bear the sins of our ancestors, we would surely be suicides.”
“I fear that I can disagree. My ancestors have pledged themselves to Erathis for as long as there are records in Toradan,” Keverel said.
“Surely we don’t have to remind the good cleric that holy men sin,” Kithri said. “If we do have to remind him, I know some songs.”
“I don’t think so,” Keverel said, but once Kithri got started with a song, there was no stopping her.
Here I am, Remy thought periodically over the next few days of riding. I am with a group of strangers on a quest that means little to me. Why did they insist I come with them? Why didn’t they leave me at the market?
The box that had caused all the trouble was a foot long, give or take, and perhaps three inches wide and two deep. Its clasp was pewter and the seam between its lid and the box was invisible—unless magical attention was directed at it. The seam had glowed right along with the sigils on its lid when Iriani had first investigated the box. Remy wondered again what would happen if he opened it. It had been some time since anyone or anything had tried to take it from him.
What did Philomen want? Was Biri-Daar right that the vizier was untrustworthy, that he had sent Remy out into the wastes to die? Biri-Daar’s theory was that Philomen needed the object Remy carried to disappear because other forces in Avankil wanted it. Or that Remy was never intended to survive the trip to Toradan, and that after his death some agent of the vizier’s would have found his body and recovered the box.
No one in the group seemed to have any patience for the idea that Remy had been intended to deliver the box to Toradan.
“Who were you supposed to speak to there?” Biri-Daar asked on their fourth day. The Crow Road switchbacked down a steep slope for as far as they could see in front of them before disappearing into what looked like a lowland jungle. They weren’t in the lowlands yet, but before they got to the Whitefall there would be a good deal of marsh to traverse. Biri-Daar remembered that much of her previous passage along the road.
“I was given a place,” Remy said. “The vizier told me that when I arrived at Toradan, I should find the Monastery of the Cliff and speak to the abbot. But he never told me the abbot’s name.”
“The Monastery of the Cliff,” Biri-Daar echoed. “What would those monks want with a package from the vizier of Avankil?” She clucked her tongue, something that Remy had learned meant she was mulling a problem with no obvious solution. “You were sent out into the desert to die, Remy,” she said shortly. “That is clear to you now, isn’t it?”
“I know it’s clear to you,” Remy said. “That’s why I came along. But I still don’t understand … I don’t know anything. What does any of this Karga Kul business have to do with me?”
“The Abyss pursues you. And demons threaten Karga Kul,” Biri-Daar said quietly. “Do you want to stake your life on that being a coincidence? I would sooner cut my own throat than deliver an unknown, magically guarded item to the monks on the cliff.”
“Why?”
“It has been long years since those monks kept their holy orders,” Biri-Daar said.
They r
ode in silence for some time after that. Eventually Remy worked up his nerve and said, “Biri-Daar. This is a personal quest for you.”
The dragonborn nodded.
“Almost an obsession.”
Biri-Daar made no response.
“Perhaps your obsession is making it seem like my errand has something to do with your quest,” Remy said. “I don’t see it.”
“Would you like to turn around and go home now, Remy?” Biri-Daar asked.
Yes, Remy wanted to say. I would like to turn around and go home and forget that any of this ever happened.…
Except that wasn’t true. All his life he had dreamed of adventure. He had looked at the ships docked in Quayside and imagined going all the places they had gone … all the places his father had gone. Remy had insatiably devoured every tale of heroism and magic, of questing and exploration, that he could find. He had learned to read solely so he could follow the stories told in the one book his mother had—her great-uncle’s memoirs about his time at sea in the waters far beyond the Dragondown Coast, waters beset with floating ice or great mats of living vines that grew up from the depths to ensnare and destroy unwary mariners …
He had memorized the names of every city and town on the coast and determined to visit each and every one, swearing to himself that he would make his name in the world and leave behind stories that other men would write.
“No,” he said to Biri-Daar. “I don’t want to go home.”
“Wise,” said the paladin.
“We both know I can’t go home anyway. It’s not wise to accept that which cannot be changed.”
“Perhaps not,” Biri-Daar said. “But it is certainly unwise not to. You are good company, Remy. And you have the makings of a fine warrior, it seems to me. But you are with us because … I must be honest here. You are with us because I trust nothing that has any taint of the vizier,” Biri-Daar said. “And that includes you.”