by Alex Irvine
First came color: black warming through red to a fiery molten orange flecked with brilliant white. Then motion, the shapes of figures …
Remy saw Obek turn his head, ever so slightly. He followed the tiefling’s gaze and saw that Shikiloa was doing something with her hands. Looking back to the mirror, Remy watched the figures resolve. They were all shapes, all sizes, the nameless hordes of the Abyss under the control of their ruler Orcus. Orcus, the Demon Prince of the Undeath, sworn enemy of all things living. Goat-legged, dragon-tailed, with the horns of a ram and the fiery eyes of the greater undead. Bearer of the Wand of Orcus, with its skull of a dead god, Despot of Thanatos—his presence loomed over everything they saw.
“It is as I feared,” Uliana said. She spoke with her eyes closed, since to channel the vision into the mirror she could not see it herself—at least not with her eyes. “They are gathering. They know that the seal weakens. They know …”
Motion drew Remy’s attention away from the mirror and back to Shikiloa. He saw her hands move. She brought a hand to her face, kissed something she held between finger and thumb.
When she drew it away again, blood glistened on her lower lip.
Shikiloa extended her hand over the mirror. “Father,” she said, her voice low but clear in the nearly silent room. “As you bid me.”
As she opened her hand, Obek was reaching to catch the bright bloody sliver that fell from it. Redbeard, his eyes bulging from their sockets as he saw what she had done, flung out an arm and shoved her back away from the mirror, the action instinctive but futile as the sliver fell through Obek’s hand as if it was not there.
Obek clutched at his pierced palm, roaring with pain. Blood spurted from it as if it had been pierced by a spear rather than a sliver no thicker than a needle. Drops of that blood fell with the sliver onto the mirror’s surface. The color of the blood spread like a glaze across the scene of Orcus’s dominion. When it had covered the entire surface of the mirror, the entire surface flipped up to the vertical. Behind the bloody glaze, figures loomed closer. Something crashed into the finish.
“Traitor!” Obek roared, his bloody hand thrust out at Shikiloa. “Like your father.”
Another crash against the glaze left a crack exactly the size of the sliver that had fallen from Shikiloa’s hand. She met his gaze, cold and distant. “You are a traitor to all humanity. And your kin, the demons, are coming to claim you.”
“Fool,” growled Biri-Daar. Another crack appeared in the surface of the mirror. The Mage Trust, save Uliana, fell back toward the shadowed galleries in the points of the star-shaped room. “Who turned you against the trust?”
A chip of the mirror came loose and plinked on the hexagonal stones of the floor. Sound came from it: a profusion of roaring and screeching, the scraping of what sounded like claws on the other side of the mirror.
“No one turned me,” Shikiloa sneered. “I am my own creature. My choices are my own. The tiefling dies if the city has to die with him.”
“How did you know he would be here?” Remy asked.
From the look on her face, he knew the answer.
“Philomen,” he said.
She did not deny it. She raised a short staff, its head transforming before their eyes from a crescent moon to an iridescent green skull.
“No,” Uliana groaned. Her eyelids fluttered as she tried to open her eyes and get free of the vision. “No,” she said again—and then she reached out her left hand, pointed unerringly at Shikiloa, and incinerated the youngest trustee before Shikiloa could defend herself.
At that moment the mirror exploded in a hail of obsidian shards. They stung and sliced across the exposed skin of Remy’s face and hands, tearing also at the leather of his tunic and boots. He ducked away, hearing the fragments ricochet around the room. Already there were screams; the unprotected and unprepared trustees were badly cut and slashed.
The demons that came through the opened portal were about the size of dwarves, but a burnt red in color with cruel wide mouths and four-fingered hands ending in ragged black claws. They tumbled over one another coming through the mirror frame. Behind them, the fiery hellscape of Thanatos belched its miasma into the council chamber.
“Demons aren’t my kin,” Obek snarled, and cut two of them in half before their feet had found the floor.
Since leaving Avankil, Remy had seen many things he’d never seen before. Most of them he had no name for, but these he recognized. They were known as evistros, or carnage demons. Remy had heard stories of them rampaging in packs near places where Abyssal energies spilled into the mortal world. They existed only to destroy. And they were destroying now, tearing the Mage Trust to bits as the embattled trustees, few of whom had ever fought with anything other than words, found themselves overrun by the savage demons who clawed and bit and rent them without mercy. They died despite the best efforts of Biri-Daar and Remy and the rest, who cut down the evistros nearly as fast as they could pour through the violated mirror.
Of the Mage Trust, only Uliana fought with courage. Her first victim had been Shikiloa the traitor, but in the moments since she had cut a swath through the evistros as she fought to close the portal they had opened. With the mirror destroyed, she opened her eyes and began to lay waste to the enemies of the trust and her city.
“Eladrin!” she shouted above the infernal yowling evistros and the sounds of steel on demonic flesh and bone. “With me!”
The star elf vaulted clear of the melee, leaping to catch a wall sconce and swinging up to brace against a timber supporting the vaulted ceiling. Grimly and with absolute calm he began to destroy the evistros that approached Uliana. Remy too fell back to protect her, as did Obek from the other side. Keverel swatted a leaping demon out of the air as it cleared the portal. It scrambled on the ground, but before it could find its feet he broke its back and turned to the next, the name of his god repeated over and over again on his lips.
The second focus of the battle was Biri-Daar, who stood alone, her enchanted blade describing an arc of maiming and death around her. Lucan’s arrows whispered through the air to catch those evistros that got out of the portal past Keverel and Uliana. They were everywhere, in frenzied groups dismembering the dead and swarming over the living. Some, caught up in the bloodlust, turned on one another, splattering their black and sulfurous blood to mix with the spilled red of the Mage Trust.
Something tugged at Remy’s belt, pulling him off balance. He looked down and saw one of the demons, gnawing on his belt—and the pouch where he had carried the chisel across the long miles from Avankil. Remy flicked his knife out of his sleeve, the way he’d learned back home on the waterfront, and stabbed it through the eye. It lashed him across the face with one claw and kept digging for the chisel with the other. He twisted the blade, feeling the bones of its skull crack. Malignant light still shone in its remaining eye, but with the twist of the blade its arms and legs fell limp and it dropped away as a blinding flash brought tears to Remy’s eyes. When his vision cleared, he saw tumbled and blackened bodies of evistros all around, yet he was untouched save for the fading afterimage.
“Mind the chisel, Remy,” Uliana said. “If they get their hands on it, the seal is as good as destroyed.”
Looking down, Remy saw ragged claw marks scored into the leather of his belt and the pouch containing the chisel in its box. Then the evistros came again in another wave, and he lifted his sword to meet them. Over his head, Uliana’s magic swept and flared, the evistros falling back before it as slowly—slowly, and with the help of Paelias, whose fey magic was anathema to the carnage demons—she choked off the open portal. The evistros came through fewer and fewer at a time, Keverel and Lucan exacting a terrible toll at their emergence; then they came through one at a time, wriggling through a diminished hole too small to admit a full grown man; then, as Keverel caved in the snarling face of a last single demon, Uliana closed off the portal, severing the dying evistro at the waist.
Still there were dozens of them in t
he Council Chamber. Cut off from Thanatos, they knew they could expect no mercy—not that they knew anything of mercy in Orcus’s realm. Gathering into knots of three or four, they banded together and fought to the death. Lucan ended the fight with a final arrow through the gut of an evistro that had already taken a half-dozen blows from Obek’s sword.
Of the Mage Trust, Uliana alone survived. She bent to pick up a large sliver of the Black Mirror, slick with the commingled blood of the rest of the trust. “Karga Kul will never be the same,” she said quietly. “And things may yet become more desperate. Remy of Avankil.”
Remy took a step forward.
“Have you the chisel?”
“I have it,” Remy said. He remembered the stubby, grasping fingers of the evistro feeling along his belt, and shuddered at the thought of what might have happened.
“At least some of the evistros knew of it, and you may yet meet more adversaries who will. Yet you must keep it,” Uliana said. “You have brought it this far under terrible pressure and with commendable courage. Now you must keep it a little longer, for there is no one else who can be trusted to do it.”
“I would trust any of them to do it,” Remy protested, extending his arm to encompass his companions.
“Which speaks well of you. Yet you have brought it this far, and we do not know whether that is luck or strength. It would be foolish to risk a change now. You will keep it until the time comes to destroy it. Biri-Daar.”
Biri-Daar offered a shallow bow.
“You will select six Knights of Kul, the six whom you would most trust to uphold the precepts of the order. You will go with them to the guard at the Cliff Quay and you will give him this.” She wrote on a parchment and pressed it shut with her seal. “Quickly. Meet us in the Chamber of the Seal. You have the quill, yes? Make sure you keep it with you.”
Without a word, Biri-Daar took the letter and left, shards of obsidian crunching under her boots. Uliana was moving at the same time, but in the other direction. She passed her hand over a blackened iron lock bolted into the wall, which fell open. As it did, the outline of another door appeared. “We must go now,” she said. “It may already be too late.”
The door opened to a narrow passage that angled down. “There are few ways to the Chamber of the Seal,” Uliana said. “This, and one other from below that only the trust knows of. At least I believe that is so.”
Remy could easily touch both walls of the passage without extending his arms all the way. The stone was cold and smooth, the angle down into the interior of the cliff from which loomed the towers of Karga Kul consistent even as the passage doubled back on itself, zigzagging down and ever down. Remy touched the walls every so often, because it kept everything real. He had seen so much in the past weeks—how long had it been since he had left Avankil? He thought perhaps only a month—that he found it difficult at moments like these to believe in even the simple reality of stone.
They reached a landing, hexagonal in shape, with doors in each of the six walls. “You would not want to open the wrong door here,” Uliana said. She walked slowly in a counterclockwise circle, touching the center of each door as she passed it. After a complete circuit, she stopped at the door directly underneath the staircase. Before she touched it, the door opened, disappearing into the wall. As they passed over the threshold, Remy looked and could see no sign that the door had ever existed.
Down they went again. “We are at the deepest levels of the ancient chambers cut into the cliff,” Uliana said. “Soon we will be below the level of the sea. I have not been this way since my initiation into the Mage Trust. I hope I never come here again.”
Remy thought he could smell the sea, but all he could see was the immediate length of the passage in front of him. The floor glistened in the Erathian light sparkling from Keverel’s helm and the head of Uliana’s staff. When they came to a branch in the passage—the first they had encountered since going through the door—Uliana nodded toward it and said, “The knights, if they come, will come from there.”
“They will come,” Keverel said.
They passed the branch and Remy looked to see if he could detect any light from approaching dragonborn paladins. The branch was dark. “They will come,” he echoed, and they passed on.
The roof of the passage grew higher, and vaulted. “Now we are in an ancient level that existed long before Karga Kul was called Karga Kul. Archives in long-dead languages mention this place as myth. It is possible that the builders of the first of these labyrinths opened a portal to the Abyss intentionally.”
“Never a good idea,” Lucan said.
“Your sense of humor is inappropriate,” Uliana said.
Paelias winked at his elf cousin. “But appreciated,” he said softly.
Next they came to a massive stone door, polished to a gloss that shone in the near-darkness. It was built of fourteen panels, seven black and seven red. “The colors of our vanished forebears,” Uliana said. “Red for blood and war, black for ink and knowledge.”
“Blood and ink,” Keverel said. “Books and killing build cities.”
Lucan looked surprised. “Irreverent, holy man? That’s unlike you.”
“Proximity to the Abyss, perhaps, pollutes my demeanor,” Keverel said, gritting his teeth.
“Leave him alone,” Remy said.
Lucan looked to him, flashing a bit of the suspicion Remy had seen in him right after joining the group back at Crow Fork Market. Then he looked away. “All of us need to back down,” he said. Flicking an arrow from his quiver, he spun it through his fingers like a baton and slipped it back in, choosing his saber instead.
The rest of them dropped hands to hilts as Uliana worked an invisible charm that opened the fourteen-paneled door. It swung silently back, revealing a great chamber, its ceiling lost in darkness and its walls writhing with ancient relief sculptures. They entered, and for a moment looked on in astonishment. “A marvelous people they must have been,” Uliana whispered. “I mourn them though they have been dead for thousands of years. The world is impoverished by their absence.”
Remy listened to her, and wondered what it must be like to think so deeply about the past. The present was more than enough for him to handle. The sculptures on the walls were of great heroes, three times the height of a man, depicted in postures of combat against demonic enemies. “They built this place as a shrine and a warning,” Keverel said. “How long has the seal lasted?”
“How long since the Road-builder shed his mortal life and became a lich?” Uliana answered. “The records become partial, then fragmentary, then …” She gestured up at the sculptures. “Then they are gone. Perhaps someone, somewhere, knows. I fear, though, that the only beings who know the true history of the seal and the city that became Karga Kul are …”
She pointed to the center of the room, as the sound of the approaching knights echoed down the passage outside.
The portal between Karga Kul and the Abyss was a circular stone door, set into the floor and without visible hinge or spring. The seal itself was a rectangular stone the size of a coffin lid and perhaps two feet thick, laid over the narrow gap between portal and bedrock floor. Once it had been a mighty stone, carried in by six dragonborn Knights of Kul who held it down while the first of the Mage Trust carved the first characters in the first seal.
None of them had known that already the Road-builder had made Moidan’s Quill, with which Uliana stood ready to write, the seat and repository of his treacherous soul. At last, they would replenish the seal, destroy the quill, get permanently rid of the Road-builder, save Karga Kul, and restore the status of the Knights of Kul.
Or they would all die.
Six hand-picked knights held the replacement seal, which could not touch the portal until the old Seal was removed; doubling the seal would have the effect of canceling both. So there would be a moment when the portal, necessarily, was open. The gods alone knew—and perhaps not even they—what would come through during that time.
“H
old it so that it overlaps from the seal to the floor,” Uliana ordered. “Exactly as the other one.” She looked over at Biri-Daar, who stood at the head of the ceremonial guard carrying the new seal. “The last time this was done, it was the abbot of the Monastery of the Cliff who held the quill. Or so it is hinted in the oldest records we have yet found.”
“Those same monks are now corrupt,” Keverel said. “They are a canker on the city of Toradan. When this is done, they are our next task.”
“When,” Paelias said. “The certainty of the holy man.”
“Quiet, please. It is time to write.” Uliana held up the quill. Remy had noticed something odd about her voice and looking at her he realized what it was: she was quietly weeping as she spoke. Before he had more than the briefest moment to wonder why, she thrust the quill into her left eye.
A low, quivering noise escaped her but she remained perfectly still. Removing the quill from her eye, she bent over the new Seal and began to write.
Each sigil burned as she inscribed it, blood and fluid from Uliana’s sacrificed eye dripping from her chin but her hand never wavering from its task. The quill moved in broad sweeping curves across the seal. The Knights of Kul looked away from her as she approached each of them in turn, working letter by agonized letter through the inscription that would reseal the portal to Thanatos. And as she wrote, the quill began to burn. Remy’s pulse quickened. If it burned away before she finished, would the Seal hold back the hordes of Orcus?
And would …?
Shadows began to form and pool in one corner of the room, farthest from the door. Biri-Daar saw Remy looking. She turned her head and saw exactly what Remy saw. She took a step around the edge of the portal to position herself between Uliana and the gathering shadows. They ballooned, piled on each other and grew up along the wall. Remy thought he saw a humanoid shape emerging.