by Alex Irvine
The seal of Karga Kul
( Dungeons and Dragons )
Alex Irvine
Alex Irvine
The seal of Karga Kul
In the shadow of empires, the past echoes in the legends of heroes. Civilizations rise and crumble, leaving few places that have not been touched by their grandeur. Ruin, time, and nature claim what the higher races leave behind, while chaos and darkness fill the void. Each new realm must make its mark anew on the world rather than build on the progress of its predecessors.
Numerous civilized races populate this wondrous and riotous world of Dungeons amp; Dragons. In the early days, the mightiest among them ruled. Empires based on the power of giants, dragons, and even devils rose, warred, and eventually fell, leaving ruin and a changed world in their wake. Later, kingdoms carved by mortals appeared like the glimmer of stars, only to be swallowed as if by clouds on a black night.
Where civilization failed, traces of it remain. Ruins dot the world, hidden by an ever-encroaching wilderness that shelters unnamed horrors. Lost knowledge lingers in these places. Ancient magic set in motion by forgotten hands still flows in them. Cities and towns still stand, where inhabitants live, work, and seek shelter from the dangers of the wider world. New communities spring up where the bold have seized territory from rough country, but few common folk ever wander far afield. Trade and travel are the purview of the ambitious, the brave, and the desperate. They are wizards and warriors who carry on traditions that date to ancient times. Still others innovate, or simply learn to fight as necessity dictates, forging a unique path.
Truly special individuals, however, are rare. An extraordinary few master their arts in ways beyond what is required for mere survival or protection. For good or ill, such people rise up to take on more than any mundane person dares. Some even become legends.
These are the stories of those select few…
BOOK I
THE WASTES
Remy lay dying, the poison of stormclaw scorpions burning its way through his veins, and while he died he tried to pray. Pelor, he called out, save me. The god did not answer. Remy tried to look around him, but dark was falling and his eyes were sticky and dry, whether from the venom or something else he didn’t know. He fell into a fever dream as beside him, the horse he had ridden past the Crow Fork breathed its last.
He was a boy of twelve, weaving through Quayside with a message for the captain of a river barge. He was barefoot because his mother forbade him to wear shoes on warm days. The stones of the Quayside wharves were familiar to him, as were its smells: stagnant water, woodsmoke, sun-baked mud. Avankil stood at the head of the Blackfall Estuary, which slowly opened out for a hundred miles or more. The Blackfall itself was meandering and brackish there, a creature of tide and commerce three miles wide and studded with vessels of every description. Remy found the barge captain smoking a pipe on the deck of his vessel, sharing an uproarious joke with one of Avankil’s custom-house clerks. Silver and what looked like a snuff tin appeared briefly in the captain’s hands before vanishing into the clerk’s pocket. Permission to board, Remy called out. I have a message for the captain.
Board then, the captain answered.
Still out of breath from the run-he’d come all the way from the Undergate of the Keep of Avankil-Remy delivered his message. Is that right, the captain mused. He worked the stem of his pipe around in his teeth. Well. Here is something to carry back.
He wrote on a sheet of paper, in an alphabet that Remy-who could read Common well enough-could not decipher. Show this to no one but the vizier himself, the captain said. Or, if you must, his double.
How will I know the difference? Remy asked.
The captain laughed. The customs clerk joined in. Remy burned silently, not understanding the joke. If you ever figure that out, tell me, the captain said. He gave Remy a piece of silver. Go now.
The seventy-ninth vizier of Avankil, counsellor to kings and keeper of the library, unchallenged lord of the Undergate and all that passed through it, was named Philomen. It was rumored that he had once spent a hundred years perfecting an enchantment for creating doubles of oneself, and that he lived on in those doubles, moving his spirit from one to another as each body aged beyond its prime. Philomen was rarely seen in public. Remy had seen him twice, and to Remy the vizier seemed impossibly old. If he was moving his spirit into new bodies, he wasn’t doing it nearly soon enough.
Where does a man learn such magic? he asked his mother once.
The Abyss, she answered. Don’t ask again. Remy had mistrusted magic ever after. His mother was kind but not foolish, imaginative but not superstitious. If she believed that Philomen’s magic came from the Abyss, Remy believed it too.
He came to the Undergate bearing the barge captain’s message. A guard at the gate, big as a dragonborn and just a bit less ugly, demanded the message.
I cannot, Remy said. It is for the vizier only.
The guard caught Remy’s arm and squeezed until Remy could feel the bones of his wrist grinding together. He stood it for as long as he could but eventually he cried out and dropped the slip of paper on the ground. The guard picked it up and squinted at the writing. He looked at Remy. What does it say?
How should I know? Remy answered. I can barely read, and I don’t know those letters.
Remy snapped briefly out of the fever. Cold sand against his cheek, cold stars overhead in a cold, cold sky. Remy shivered and knew he was going to die. This was what he got for going beyond the Crow Fork. All the world was darkness and cold. Something was eating the horse. Remy tried to look over and see what it was. He couldn’t lift his head. He tried to crawl away but couldn’t move his arms. With a sigh that was meant to be a scream he faded back into his delirium.
At the Crow Fork, the North Road splits, one arm reaching across the wastes toward the fabled Bridge of Iban Ja, where the Crow Road begins. There stands Crow Fork Market, an ancient trading post and bastion against the hobgoblin raiders who harry and destroy civilized outposts throughout the wastes between the Blackfall and the Draco Serrata Mountains to the north. Over the centuries the market had grown from a collection of tents to a fortified settlement and staging area. It sprawled and wound behind timber walls and beneath the pitiless sun of the wasted lands that stretch from the North Road away from the Blackfall toward the mountains. Remy had gone there for the first time a month before his father died, on a trading excursion in the company of a dozen other men and boys, of whom Remy was the youngest by more than a year. On that trip he had learned most of what he knew of the folklore of the Crow Road and the Draco Serrata. Those were stories for the campfire on the trip from Avankil; by the end of the trip, when the timbered walls had heaved out of the hazy glimmer at the horizon, Remy had been ablaze with the desire to see the world beyond the city he had known.
As he had fallen asleep that night, within sight of the glow of great fires and magical illumination inside Crow Fork Market, Remy had dreamed of going there again. And that night he had dreamed of taking ship and seeing the cities and towns of the Dragondown Coast: Karga Kul the largest, but Furia, Toradan and Saak-Opole each with their own histories and points of interest to an urchin who had rarely ventured beyond the walls of Avankil.
He had never dreamed that it would be six years before he saw Crow Fork Market again, or that when he saw it he would ride by, his errand too pressing to admit digression.
The vizier Philomen had found him soon after his mother’s death, which had occurred not long after the death of his father. Orphaned, Remy squatted where he could and fed himself how he could. Philomen’s guard-the one who a few years before had ground the bones of Remy’s w
rist-caught that same wrist one afternoon as Remy was dashing off with a message from a ship’s captain to the woman he kept in apartments overlooking the Inner Pool. The vizier has messages that need carrying, the guard had said. Remy had never been certain whether it was an invitation or a demand; it had never occurred to him that he could refuse.
He heard the muted clop of horses’ hooves on hard earth. The road from Avankil to Toradan-the road at whose side Remy would shortly die-was laid down of stones cut flat and placed so that in most places a knife blade would not slip between them. Hooves made a different sound there. Someone was riding off the road.
To me, Remy thought. Someone is riding to help.
“Stormclaw scorpions.” The voice drifted down through the veils of Remy’s fever. He tried to answer but could not.
“The horse is dead.”
“Notice that, did you?”
Something prodded Remy’s hip. “This one isn’t, though, I don’t think.” That voice came closer. Remy vomited and tried to speak as several voices joined in rough laughter.
“Not quite. Got some life left in him.”
“Late. Maybe we should camp anyway, see if he makes it through the night.”
“And then what?” The voices blurred together, too fast for Remy to follow. The last clear thing he heard was, “We should leave him.”
He dreamed in his fever of catching fish in the shadowed water under the wharves. Sometimes when one of the wizards or alchemists of Avankil disposed of failed elixirs, remnant trickles found their way to those slack waters, producing monstrosities. Once Remy had caught a fish with tiny hands. He had been about to throw it back when a passing woman, her face hooded by a dark cloak embroidered with the constellations of summer, bought it from him for thirty pieces of gold. It was that money Remy had used to buy his first short sword, an unadorned blade whose hilt Remy had re-wrapped with wire and leather scavenged from dockside rubbish heaps. He had enough left over for a month of lessons with one of the drillmasters who trained the garrisons of the keep. He had taken to wearing the sword, but not everywhere. Avankil had laws about which of its citizens could be armed and when. Remy had no desire to break them, and no desire to provoke random belligerents who might swagger across his path from the docks or the Ferry Gate.
Despite his discretion, he had crossed swords more than once and had killed a man the year before. A drifting sword for hire, killing time on the Quayside, had seen Remy receive a message and a few coins. Catching up with Remy in one of the twisting alleys between Quayside and the downstream terminus of the Outer Wall, he had left Remy no choice. Since then Remy had moved with more caution through streets he had once thought he owned. When he was a boy, he was just one more boy flitting through the streets of Avankil; as he became a man, he attracted more notice.
Once a year, perhaps, he found some oddity dangling from his hook. Some of them died as soon as he brought them up. Some frightened him enough to drop the whole line into the water. Some were pathetic, freakish, fit only for an afterlife suspended in amber fluid on the top shelf of some distracted alchemist’s study. All of them were mysteries Remy didn’t particularly want to solve.
What’s in the box?
“No,” Remy moaned. “Don’t.”
The vizier had warned him. If you open the box-if you so much as crack the seal that holds it shut-you might not die, but you will wish you had. And if you don’t die from what the box contains, you most certainly will when I find you again. You are a good messenger, Remy. Do not disappoint me in this.
With that, the vizier Philomen had disappeared through the curtains into his inner chambers, leaving Remy with the box he dared not open and a letter to present at the stable just inside the Undergate, in return for which he would be given a horse. Toradan was a week’s ride. Perhaps ten days if he made excellent time and encountered no trouble along the way.
Remy woke to the smell of stew. The odor of cooking fat hooked him and hauled him up from the depths of his fever into waking life. He shivered and opened his eyes, confused at first by the angle of the sun. Long shadows lay across the wastes and behind he heard conversation in low voices. He rolled over, legs tangled in a blanket that was not his. He blinked the sleep from his eyes and pinpointed where the voices where coming from.
Like most residents of Avankil-or any of the settlements along the Dragondown Coast-Remy had only seen a few dragonborn. They kept to themselves, by and large, and their travels-for the dragonborn were a rootless and wandering race-tended to pause only in the company of other dragonborn. From time to time, Remy had seen them on board ships that docked Quayside. Once he had run a message from one such seafarer to the dragonborn clan enclave upstream of Quayside, near the Outer Wall in the oldest quarter of Avankil. On the whole, dragonborn didn’t spend much time in the settled coastal cities, preferring to spend their time in places more likely to yield adventure.
And there was one-a female, no less, armed and armored-stirring a small pot over a campfire off the road between Avankil and Toradan. She looked over at the motion and said, “Ah. So you did live. Praise to Bahamut.”
“Or to Keverel’s medicines,” cut in a halfling woman sitting at the dragonborn’s left. She nodded at a human wearing the holy symbol of Erathis and the sunburn of someone who spent most of his time under a roof.
“The cleric is honest in his worship. Bahamut does not consider the followers of Erathis enemies of the Law,” the dragonborn returned. “Be flip about something else, Kithri.”
The halfling stood and somersaulted backward. “I am flip,” she announced, and went over to Remy. “So. I’m Kithri.” Pointing at each member of the party in turn, she introduced them. “The humorless dragonborn there is Biri-Daar. Keverel there saved your life with his clerical ministrations. He and Biri-Daar will bore you to death with their notions about Bahamut and Erathis. You ask me, there’s not much difference between a god of civilization and law and a divine dragon dedicated to justice and honor. The sourpuss with the bow is Lucan, and the quiet one in the wizard’s cloak is Iriani.”
She squatted and tapped Remy on the shoulder. “Now you know us. Here’s what we know about you. You were traveling from Avankil. You were attacked by stormclaw scorpions. You killed several of them. After they killed your horse and you slipped into your fever, something else came along and ate the horse.”
“You should feel lucky it didn’t eat you,” Lucan said from the other side of the campfire. He was an elf. His dress, leathers, and muted colors marked him as a ranger with long experience in the trackless wilderness of the Dragondown. Iriani, sitting quietly at the edge of the campfire’s light, also had the elongated, angular features that bespoke elf blood, but his aspect was more human. A half-elf, Remy thought. They were known to be drawn to the magical arts. Iriani had acknowledged Kithri’s introduction with a nod in Remy’s direction but had not yet spoken.
Already it was brighter, the shadows were shorter, and Remy realized with a shock that it was not evening but morning. He sat up and thought that he might attempt to get to his feet.
“How long have I been…?”
“Before we came along, who knows?” Kithri said. “A day, probably. And another half day since we found you. Probably other travelers passed during that time but didn’t think you had anything worth taking.”
“She and I disagree about that,” Lucan said.
“Lucan and I disagree about everything,” Kithri said. “It passes the time.”
“If there are stormclaws around, probably there’s a ruin nearby,” added the cleric Keverel. “They tend to congregate in such places. I believe this road dates from the times of Bael Turath, before the great war. There could have been an outpost…” He trailed off, looking around. “The land reclaims what the higher races abandon.”
“Higher races,” Kithri said drolly. “Speak for yourself.”
“Wonder if there’s anything to be gained from having a look around for that ruin,” Lucan said.
; “Depends,” Biri-Daar said. “Are you taking our mission to Karga Kul seriously, or are you adventuring?”
“You say adventuring like it’s a bad thing,” Kithri said.
“Wait,” Remy said. He was having trouble following everything they said; it seemed like he was still feeling the effects of the venom. “I have to get to Toradan,” he said.
“It’s that way,” Kithri said, pointing down the road. “Maybe five day on foot. Not that it matters. If you go walking alone in this desert, you won’t live a day.”
“My errand is urgent. I-I thank you for saving me, but the vizier of Avankil will-”
“String you up by your thumbs? Run a ring through your nose and lead you around his chambers? Put you to work in the kitchen?” Kithri winked, but Remy had no time or patience for jokes. He was frightened and confused and very conscious of the time he had lost on his task for Philomen.
“Please,” Remy said. “I have to take this to Toradan.” He showed her the box. Reflexively his fingers traced the runes carved into its lid.
“What exactly is the errand?” Keverel asked. His fingers traced the outline of his holy symbol, a silver pendant worked in the gear-and-sunburst motif of Erathis. “What does the box contain?”
“I don’t know,” Remy said.
“No one told you?”
Lucan tsked. “Never take anything anywhere for anyone unless you know what it is,” he said.
“And why they want it to go where they want it to go,” Kithri added.
“I already did,” Remy said. “And now that I’ve said it, I have to do it.”
“Admirable,” said Biri-Daar. “It is too rare that one finds that kind of commitment. But unless you want to walk the rest of the way by yourself,” the dragonborn went on, “you’re going to be traveling with us for a while. And scorpions are hardly the worst things you’re going to find out here.”