by Alex Irvine
Obek extended his right hand. “You will see,” he said. “There will come a time when you look at each other and think yourselves fools for debating over this so long.”
As they shook hands, Remy realized it was the first time he had ever touched a tiefling. He had seen them occasionally in Avankil, but the superstitions about the race died hard. Few in that city trusted tieflings—or dragonborn, for that matter, but the dragonborn were understood to be of a higher nature. Tieflings, the average citizen of the Dragondown believed, were still barely a step away from the Abyssal side of their heritage.
“So, you are Remy,” Obek said. “What is it you carry, Remy?”
Steel sang as Lucan drew, the point of his sword snapping still an inch from the hollow under Obek’s jaw. “That’s the wrong question, tiefling,” Lucan said.
“Draw back, ranger,” Obek said. He didn’t seem afraid. His hand in Remy’s was callused and powerful, but Remy felt no threat.
“Answer, then.”
“I overheard certain things at Iskar’s Landing,” Obek said. “And put them together with the rumors that rumble from the darker corners of Karga Kul and Toradan. There are those who want Philomen’s errand completed, and those who would take the cargo and send it to the bottom of the Gulf.” His eyes settled on Remy again.
“We do not know what Philomen’s errand is,” Biri-Daar pointed out. “That is why we brought Remy. We could not chance letting his package fall into the wrong hands.”
“No one seems to know what the errand is,” Obek said. “You have been in the wilderness for some time. I have been in the city. Rumors fly, and there are more plots afoot than anyone can count. There has been a great slaughter in the Monastery of the Cliff at Toradan, and demons cluster like flies in the older parts of Karga Kul. Whatever he has, it is a critical piece of a very important puzzle.”
Paelias stepped forward and pushed Lucan’s sword down. “So by gathering up our hapless Remy and his most dangerous cargo, we have put ourselves in the same danger he is in.”
“Truth.” Obek nodded. He turned back to Biri-Daar. “You are here for Moidan’s Quill, are you not?”
There was a long pause before she answered. “Yes.”
“Then you will be facing the Road-builder himself,” Obek said.
“He will not be the worst we face,” Biri-Daar said.
“He will be if he kills us all,” Kithri said. Everyone turned to look at her. “It’s true,” she said. “Since we’re all of a sudden so concerned with truth above all else.”
Biri-Daar started climbing the stairs again. She seemed stronger. They would need her at her strongest, Remy thought. All of them climbed up and out of the lower levels of the Keep, emerging to the strangest sight any of them had ever beheld.
Over their heads, the churning ribbon of the Whitefall, the black stones of the canyon that contained it, the greens and browns and yellows of the highlands stretching away to the Draco Serrata in one direction and the coastal plains in the other. A sky of every color but blue, and the sky itself, underneath and endless, darkening directly below their feet to a midnight indigo in which they could see the faintest pinpricks of stars.
“My stomach will not accept this,” Lucan said. He turned away from the vista, facing the wall of the Keep’s central tower.
The rest of them looked around the courtyard, where lay the remnants of the Keep’s first garrison and residents—their bones, their clothing, their boots. Kithri and Remy kicked through it, wondering if there was anything of value and wondering, too, whether these long-dead soldiers and cooks would rise to attack the living intruders. But the bones stayed dead, and yielded nothing more interesting than a ring of keys. Kithri picked them up. They were iron, and without rust.
“Interesting,” Paelias said. “There’s no rhyme or reason to the way things age and decay. In the refuse pit I saw an apple core that looked as if someone had bitten into it this morning. Here we have bones as dry as any found in a thousand-year-old tomb.”
“It’s a dead man’s magic,” Lucan said. “Emphasis on the man. Humans know so little of time that they have even less grasp of it after they die.”
The eladrin and the elf ranger looked each other in the eye, something passing between them. “What?” Keverel asked.
“Lich,” Biri-Daar said. “They are deciding between them that the Road-builder has become a lich.”
“Yes,” Paelias said.
Remy looked at each member of the group in turn. They were all facing one another except him and Obek. Sidling a step closer to the tiefling, he asked quietly, “What’s a lich?”
“A human wizard of great power,” Keverel said, “who undergoes a dark ritual to survive beyond death. If the Road-builder is a lich, we’re going to need to find his phylactery, the vessel that contains his soul. We must destroy it to kill him. It will be somewhere in the Keep.”
“Perhaps, perhaps not,” Paelias interjected. “For all we know it’s back in the tomb. It could be anywhere.”
Keverel looked doubtful. “It’s a rare lich that wants its phylactery too far away. But we shall find out soon enough.”
Over at the wall, Biri-Daar looked out through an arrow slit, listening absently to the lich discussion. Remy had come to the wall as well, his head spinning with the inversion of earth and sky. The paladin’s brief season of humor seemed to have faded. Again she was her implacably determined paladin self. “I fear the worst about the quill,” she said, “and we must find it to confirm those fears or teach me that they were mistaken.”
“Biri-Daar.” She looked over at him. Remy was nervous to say what he was about to say, but it needed to be said. “Couldn’t we leave the box here?”
“We don’t know what’s inside,” she said.
“True,” he said.
“You will carry it until the gods will that you put it down,” she said. “There is no avoiding that. Accept your burden, Remy. Carry it through. The reasons will become clear to you.”
He realized then that he was more like Kithri or Lucan than Keverel or Biri-Daar. The gods were real to him but distant. He spoke the name of Pelor because it had been spoken around him in his boyhood. In contrast, Erathis and Bahamut were real and present, a constant and living influence over the cleric and the dragonborn paladin.
Looking out the window at the bottomless sky below, Biri-Daar said, “There is a long way to fall.”
“How far would you fall? Before you turned around and started to fall down. Real down.” Kithri had appeared next to them. She looked confused. “When we came down the shaft inside the Road-builder’s sarcophagus, one moment it was climbing down and the next up and down weren’t the same directions. How far away … is there a magical field?”
Paelias, also coming over to lean against the windowsill, shook his head. “I do not know. This is an ancient magic, a kind of magic few initiates in any discipline would attempt—would know how to attempt—today.”
“Back to the lich,” Biri-Daar said. “O eladrin, you manipulate the conversation with surpassing skill.”
Paelias rolled his eyes. “Simple truths are all I speak.”
“It’s time to go.” Biri-Daar shifted the straps of her shield and walked from the wall to the great double doors, bound in dwarf-forged iron, that hid the mysteries of the central keep.
The great hall of the keep was quiet and cool, the only light within cast by the gap between the open doors. Once the hall would have been alive with a fire in the hearth, music from bards and jongleurs, the echoing impacts of bootheels and the click of dogs’ nails, but all of those noises were lost to the past. What remained was silence. “Where will the Road-builder be?” Biri-Daar asked, talking to herself. She turned to Lucan and Keverel, who had entered behind her. “How many towers are there? I thought I counted four from the ground.”
“Four at the outer corners of the walls, and then there are four in more of a diamond shape inside,” Lucan answered. “I made a circuit to be sure. It
looks as if there’s some kind of bridge connecting the tops of all four towers.”
“I’ll answer your question,” Obek said. “The Road-builder will be where he can see his road. That means up.” He pointed to an open stairwell at the far end of the great hall. “All the way up, is my guess.”
Up into the tower they climbed. At each landing they stopped and broke down the doors facing each other across the tattered woven rugs that were the only splash of color in the gray stone of the tower’s interior. The rooms had once, perhaps, been sentry posts or firing positions for archers, storage areas or maid’s quarters. They were small, furnished only with ruins, their slitted windows looking out into the dizzying inverted outside world. On the sixth landing, Biri-Daar held up a hand. “Kithri,” she said. “Up one floor and back, quickly.”
Kithri could move like smoke. She was back within a minute, but even that minute was long enough for the rest of them to grow edgy and over-watchful, certain that something had happened to her and that they were waiting for an onrushing doom.
Then Kithri reappeared. “Next floor opens onto a bridge,” she said. “It passes over the courtyard inside the central keep to a rooftop garden. If you go the other way on the bridge, it connects all of the towers—just like Lucan thought from down below.”
Biri-Daar nodded. “That garden is where the Road-builder, when he was human, was known to study and walk. Or so the stories would have it. If he has become a lich, he will be there or he will be inside the chambers that adjoin it. From here, we must act as if he will attack at any moment.”
They assumed their battle order, altered with the addition of Obek, and ascended that last floor, coming out onto the open stone bridge that arched from the tower to the Road-builder’s garden. “Don’t look up,” Biri-Daar said.
“Or down,” Lucan added. Obek humored him with a dry chuckle.
Remy heeded neither injunction. He had never been afraid of heights, or of hanging upside down, and the sheer displaced wonder of the Inverted Keep kept drawing his attention. He looked down, and there were stars beyond the walls of the keep; the broken stone bridge protruding from its main portcullis gate obscured a fingernail moon, ghostly in the afternoon sky. He looked up, and there was the thunder of the Whitefall, in fierce rapids above them, canyon walls descending red and gray to the highland where the Road-builder’s Tomb sat below the keyhole at the end of the Crow Road. Remy could see the ridge where they had camped, and where Obek had waited for them to go into the Tomb and then followed when they were far enough ahead that the Road-builder’s crew had had the time to do their repairs.
The tiefling walked at Remy’s right. He too seemed to be enjoying the view. “I wonder how far one would have to jump before down would be down again,” he said, and tapped Remy with an elbow. “Eh?”
“I was wondering the same thing downstairs,” Remy said. Up this high, he wasn’t quite as keen to discover the answer.
Ahead of them, the bridge peaked and then began its descent toward the garden. In another hundred yards they would have their answers about the Road-builder, one way or another. Keverel whispered a blessing of strength and fortitude over them. Remy felt the strength of the cleric’s belief wash through him, invigorating his limbs and focusing his mind. There would be battle and there would be victory. They started their descent to the garden.
As they approached, they began to see details. The garden was a riot of undead plant life and bizarre hybrids, fruits that looked like faces and flowers that dripped blood or gave off faint sparks when a breeze pushed them too close together. “I wouldn’t touch anything in there if you can avoid it,” Lucan said.
Kithri chuckled. “You don’t need to be a ranger to see that.”
The walls around the roof garden were as high as a man. Built along one of them was a long greenhouse with an enclosed stone structure set into a corner of the wall. Smoke began to curl from Biri-Daar’s nostrils. Lucan, bringing up the party’s rear with Paelias, nocked an arrow. “I hear something down there,” he said. “More than just the wind in the plants.”
As she set foot on the gravel garden path, Biri-Daar clashed her sword on her shield. “Road-builder!” she cried out. “I, Biri-Daar, paladin of Bahamut and dragonborn of Karga Kul, call on you to come out and render unto the Knights of Kul what is rightfully ours!”
Her voice echoed in the space between the walls and up into the earth-vaulted sky above. When the echoes had died away, there was a dragonborn standing before them. None of them had seen him approach. “Biri-Daar,” he said.
She nodded. “Moula. I am here for the quill.”
The dragonborn she had called Moula stood a head taller than Biri-Daar and wore armor of lacquered indigo with the totems of the Knights of Kul etched on his shield and helm. Noting this, Biri-Daar said, “And I am also here to tell you that you are no longer welcome in Karga Kul. Exile is one possibility. If I must kill you to recover the quill, however …” She clashed sword and shield again. “I confess to my god that I might take pleasure in such a killing.”
“Careful, paladin. If you take pleasure in killing, you won’t be a paladin for long.” Moula set his sword down and tightened the straps of his shield over his forearm. “To the winner the quill,” he said, picking up his sword again.
“Perhaps I might have an opinion on that topic,” came another voice, dry and sibilant. The Road-builder emerged through a glass door in the greenhouse, closing it carefully behind him. Once he had been a strong man, and handsome. But in his undeath, rich rags draped and swept around his skeletal frame, and an inhuman light shone from the empty sockets of his skull.
“It is rare to find a group of adventurers clever and hardy enough to brave my tomb and my keep,” he said. “Welcome. Although I fear that I must not let you pass on.” He gestured around the garden, and Remy, following the gesture, saw that the garden beds were nourished by the bones of previous would-be heroes.
“Remy of Avankil,” the Road-builder said. “Philomen did not tell me to expect you.”
The vizier’s name in the lich king’s mouth struck a chill in Remy’s spine. It was the confirmation of everything Biri-Daar and Keverel had been telling him from the beginning. Instinctively Remy’s hand dropped to the pouch containing the vizier’s box, as though the Road-builder might try to pickpocket him. The Road-builder laughed. “Fear not, boy,” he said. “I will not need to take it from you. Soon enough, you will offer it to me.”
“You will never touch it,” Remy said.
The Road-builder laughed again, the sound like two stones scraping against each other. “Delightful,” he said. “One forgets so easily the bravado of the living.”
Moula laughed at that, mimicking his master. “Dog,” Biri-Daar said. “Slave of Tiamat. You turn your back on the Order.”
“I realize the destiny the Order has approached since the Solstice War,” Moula said. “Tiamat would yet accept your service, I think; though she would prefer to accept your soul.”
“Ah, the Solstice War,” said the Road-builder. “I remember it with some fondness. O hardy adventurers, you do realize that you fight the latest battle in a war that has never really ended. It was the sorcerers of Arkhosia who first sealed the portal to the Abyss that opened beneath Karga Kul, halting the advance of the demons and devils who entered into a bargain with Bael Turath … and here, today, the fate of that city will be decided. Doubt it not. You are formidable, adventurers. But even if you might survive me, you cannot survive the weight of empires. The ghosts of Arkhosia and Bael Turath still contend for the mastery of this world … and through them, the Knights of Kul came to their crisis at Iban Ja’s bridge, no? Now here we have Moula and Biri-Daar, ready to fight on for the right to claim the soul of the Order.”
Returning his attention to Remy, the Road-builder held out a hand. “Don’t,” Keverel said before the lich could speak.
“Cleric, I will have it one way or another.” The Road-builder pointed out and up, toward his greatest wor
k. “If I could make that, do you imagine you can oppose my will now?”
Keverel drew out his holy symbol and held it high in front of him. The Road-builder dismissed him with a wave. “Now,” he said to Biri-Daar and Moula. “Perhaps the dragonborn would like to kill each other at this time, for the honor of their enemy gods?” He turned to the rest of the group and added, “I will do my best to occupy the rest of you.”
As he spoke the last words, bits of shadow began to detach themselves from the shadows among the garden beds, shaping into wispy versions of the Road-builder himself. They formed a perimeter around the garden and closed in. “Vestiges,” Remy heard Keverel say. “Don’t let them near you if you can help it. They die easily, but kill easily too.”
The clean, pure light of Erathis shone forth from his talisman as Keverel invoked the god’s protection. Kithri, long since out of throwing knives, slowly swung a sling back and forth. “Wonder if the bones of that skull will crack,” she said, and snapped off a shot. The Road-builder flicked the stone aside with a glance.
Ghosting in, the vestiges reached to apply their necrotic touch. Lucan’s arrows tore through them as if they were tissue; every strike swirled them away into dissipating smoke, but more and more of them rose. Kithri’s slung stones ricocheted from the garden walls after passing through the vestiges without resistance. A window in the greenhouse shattered. The Road-builder hissed. “Poor manners for a guest, halfling. Very poor,” he said.
From his hands poured liquid shadow that spilled across Remy and Obek. Remy smelled death, the scent of corpses … the scent of his own corpse. Dullness afflicted his legs. Obek growled a tiefling oath and struck out, slashing vestiges to shreds and leaping to land a strike on the Road-builder himself. Even approaching the lich took its toll; Obek bared his teeth against the Road-builder’s necromantic aura and struck again as black spots appeared on his flesh.
An entire quadrant of the vestiges blew away in a blast of light from Keverel’s talisman. The light flared brighter and brighter still—and steel clashed on steel as, their preliminaries out of the way, Biri-Daar and Moula came together in a pitiless battle of former friends. The traitor landed the first blow, shearing off a piece of Biri-Daar’s shield and cutting deeply into her upper arm. She shoved him back into a tangle of fleshy flowers, following with a barrage of blows that he barely held off. The flowers, sensing blood, grew excited. Their stalks stiffened and their petals reached and grasped like fingers.