The seal of Karga Kul (dungeons and dragons)

by Alex Irvine

  She saw the look on his face and smiled-an unsettling expression on a dragonborn. “That might be too abstract. Put another way, how do you know the demons and hobgoblins aren’t working together? Remember the demon’s eye, and the imps we killed in the stable. Everything is connected here, Remy. And you are connected to it as well, because of what you carry.”

  “What do you think it is?”

  Biri-Daar shrugged. “I have no idea. But if demons are after it, I would very much like to know, and I do not think it would be wise to let it-or you-wander off into the wastes. That is why I think it’s important that you come to Karga Kul and let the Mage Trust examine it. When the rest of our party arrives, you must make your final decision. I will say no more about it.”

  She was true to her word, not speaking for the next two hours. Remy turned every possibility over in his mind, weighing his obligation against everything he had seen and learned since leaving Avankil. He was being hunted. Now he believed that. The sun tracked across the sky, and Biri-Daar silently offered him a drink of water. Remy thought of the Dragondown, the marvels that might await him if he went to Karga Kul-and the wrath of the vizier, who would certainly kill him if he did not go to Toradan.

  Unless the vizier had been trying to kill him all along.

  I could just leave the box in the sand, he thought at one point. Bury it, or throw it into a canyon. Let someone else find it. Let the hobgoblins have it.

  But Biri-Daar’s resolute devotion to her code gave him pause. Could he really do that, not knowing what the box contained?

  In the end, when the four riding figures appeared in the distance leading two other horses, Remy realized that he knew two things. One was that Philomen had put his life in danger. The other was that Biri-Daar and the rest of them had saved it.

  “North or south?” Biri-Daar asked him when they had met the rest of the party and all six of them were in the saddle and waiting on the road.

  Remy took a deep breath. “North,” he said.

  BOOK II

  THE BRIDGE

  They rode north on a road sometimes covered by sweeping drifts of sand. Remy looked over his shoulder, riding second to last with only Keverel behind him. The road seemed endless in both directions, and he felt as if he was leaving behind something of his former self the farther he rode into the unknown reaches of the Dragondown Coast. The world was his to take.

  “Pretty clear which roads find travelers and which don’t, eh?” Lucan said. “Here we go into the real wilderness.”

  “At least we’ll get out of this damned desert,” Iriani said.

  Kithri waved toward the Serrata. “In the foothills, before we start the climb up into those,” she said, “the country is beautiful.”

  “What about after?” Remy asked.

  “After? You mean on the Crow Road?” Kithri shook her head. “Never been. Never wanted to go. But,” she sighed, “here I am, going. You can thank Biri-Daar for that.”

  “There is no collar around your neck,” Biri-Daar said without looking back.

  Kithri rolled her eyes. Around them, the flatness of Crow Fork was giving way to a more broken country. Monoliths of ancient rock stood angled against each other, product of no mortal’s work. The ground, flat enough to bowl on back near Crow Fork, was heaved and crosshatched with small gullies. The road cut through some of them and wound along the edges of others. The sand that maddened travelers on the road to Toradan disappeared and clumps of hardy scrub sprouted at the bases of rocks and in the shelter of gullies. Around them the landscape came to hard-bitten life.

  And ahead of them, far ahead, the highest peaks of the Draco Serrata gleamed white in the morning sun.

  “I thought the Crow Road was some kind of demon-infested gauntlet of horrors,” Remy said. “This isn’t terrible-looking country.”

  Keverel made a sign in the air before touching his heart and his forehead. “Do not joke about it.”

  “We’re not on the Crow Road yet,” Lucan said. “This is the road that leads to the Crow Road. It comes to an end at Iban Ja’s bridge. Once we cross that, then we’re on the Crow Road.”

  “Who’s Iban Ja?” Remy asked. That was the third or fourth time someone had mentioned the name. “And why is it his bridge?”

  The series of great wars between the dragonborn kingdom of Arkhosia and Bael Turath, that of the tieflings, brought down both empires in the end, but amid the blood and suffering shone acts of impossible heroism. Travelers knew these stories and traded them over mugs of ale and the picked-over bones of supper. Remy, who had traveled little and paid less attention to the events of the world beyond Avankil’s walls and docks, had yet to hear those stories. His five companions looked to each other with slight smiles at his naivete; by acclamation Iriani was chosen to tell the story.

  “Why me?” he asked.

  Kithri pointed to each of the party in turn. “Biri-Daar has no sense of romance and would only fume about the tieflings. Lucan is the only elf in the world who can’t sing, and he wouldn’t be fair because the story involves both Melora and Corellon. Keverel is a cleric and you should never have a cleric tell your stories. I know too many different versions of the story and am not honest enough to be trusted. Remy doesn’t know any versions of the story and is probably too honest to tell it well even if he did. That leaves you, Iriani, even though you have elf blood in you as well.”

  “I’ll tell the story as it came to me,” Iriani said.

  Kithri nodded. “So start telling. It’s a long way to the bridge.”

  The Solstice War between Arkhosia and Bael Turath was not its own war at all, but a change in plans. Yet it was called its own war because of the periods of quiet on either side of it, and because it decisively changed everything that came after. Both combatants were exhausted and winter was on the way; they fell back to their lines, entrenched, and got down to the business of preparing themselves for spring, when snow would retreat from the mountain passes and the gods would give their signals for the great war to begin again.

  Then a midwinter thaw changed everything.

  Later, the survivors would blame a dispute among the gods Melora, Corellon, and the Raven Queen. The Queen, it was said, was angry that the fighting had stopped so soon because the battlefields were so very good to her black-feathered subjects. But she loved winter too, and was torn between the pleas of the ravens and the immutable paths of the sun and stars.

  “Melora,” she said. “The wilderness is yours to command and to love. What of this great bridge the Arkhosians have built across the Gorge of Noon?”

  “The Arkhosians are builders,” Melora said. “I cannot interfere with their nature any more than a beaver’s.” In truth, though, her heart stormed at the thought of the bridge.

  “But surely the gorge’s majesty would be restored by the destruction of the bridge,” the Raven Queen purred. “Surely you could bring this about. The Arkhosians and the forces of Bael Turath are camped not twenty miles apart, in the lower vales of the Serrata with the bridge between them. Neither force wants to move farther away lest the other claim the bridge and the only passage over the gorge for fifty leagues in either direction.

  “In these lower vales, winter is not so bad,” she went on. “But it is still deep in snow, and the passes choke in avalanches. Here is what I need from you.”

  Melora’s temper was as wild as the wilderness and seas that she commanded on the earth. She knew what the Raven Queen was doing when she leaned in a little too close and spoke with a husk in her voice. She knew what the Queen was offering and what she was asking in return.

  And wild, untamed Melora thought it a workable bargain.

  “All I ask of you,” the Raven Queen said, whispering into Melora’s ear as her heart leaped and tossed like the storm-driven surf, “is that you ask a little favor of Corellon…”

  Corellon who could sing stones into life! Corellon who lent power to the singer’s voice and the artist’s eye, the mage’s spells and the sculptor�
��s chisel!

  Corellon, who when the seasons were divided at the beginning of the world begged for spring and received it because along with it came the knowledge that everything must ultimately die, that the green abundance of spring is the flare of a candle cupped against the everlasting wind and dark of death. This knowledge is the fuel of art, of thoughts of beauty, of all sorceries light and dark. Corellon is the patron of those who know they will die but are determined that they will bloom and learn and love first.

  It is said that Corellon lives in a castle whose rations and dimensions haunt the dreams of artists, adorned with tapestries telling stories the troubadors can never find tongue to repeat. Vine-haired and stone-toothed, Melora strode through the arches of this castle and found Corellon, eyes closed, listening to the music made by dust motes dancing in sunlight.

  “How would you like to push the Raven Queen a little?” she asked. Corellon’s eyes opened. Melora scattered the motes and their music jangled into chaos. “How would you like to have a little spring in her winter?”

  “If she has sent you, there is more to this offer than what you’re telling,” Corellon answered. “And I can smell her on you, which makes it a simple matter to guess what is motivating your wild little heart.”

  “To each her reasons,” Melora said. “Spring in the high country, just for a week. Think of it! What new life might grow, what stories might the peoples of the world tell of your strength in the face of the Raven Queen’s deepest winter?”

  “And why is she willing?” Corellon asked.

  “She is a good queen to her subjects, who belong to me as well,” Melora said. “The ravens are hungry.”

  “Well,” Corellon said. Already he had begun to think of the songs that might be sung. “What the Queen offered you, will you offer me?” he asked, archly, as the sculptures around them began to dance.

  That the gods have human desires is known to every child-else why should they have given those desires to us? Ah, the wilderness is fickle!

  A southwest wind curled over the passes at sunrise the next day, bringing with it smells of the lower territories where winter was forbidden. For nine days it blew. At the end of the third, each army sent scouts up the passes toward the gorge. Avalanches drove them back.

  At the end of the sixth day, each army sent scouts again. They returned, most of them, reporting that the way would be clear if the freakish thaw held for another three days.

  And hold for three days it did.

  On the morning of the tenth day, the armies marched. On the morning of the twelfth day, they stood on either side of the bridge. By noon of the twelfth day, the bridge ran knee-deep with the blood of human and tiefling, dragonborn and dwarf. The fighting on the bridge went on into the night as both sides mustered sorcerous lights to guide their armies lest they wake up in the morning and find the other side possessing the bridge.

  Centuries before, the bridge had been the Arkhosians’ mightiest work of engineering, a monument to the vision of their emperors and the building genius of the dwarves who lived in the caves along the gorge. It was a thousand feet long and wide enough for twenty men to walk across abreast, with buttresses curving down into the walls of the gorge hundreds of feet below. It was large enough that all manner of creatures had taken up residence in its stone eaves and crevices, its drains and arches. The tiefling shock troops of Bael Turath had long since slaughtered the Noon Gorge dwarves, keeping only those as slaves who might teach the Turathian architects the secrets of stone that dwarves seemed to be born with-yet the secrets of the bridge over the gorge remained known only to one man, because only that one man had performed the magics that bound its stones together. The bridge, too, had been a symbol of peace between Arkhosia and Bael Turath… or perhaps it had only come to seem such during a pause between two wars. When it did not carry soldiers, it carried caravans-and then in times of war, soldiers carried back as spoils what the merchants had once carried as goods.

  The greatest wizard of the Arkhosians was Iban Ja, confidant to emperors, Seer of Infinitudes, and magical overseer of the dwarf engineers who had built the bridge. He watched the battle from a cliffside perch on the Arkhosian side of the gorge, participating as the battle demanded and commanding the ranks of Arkhosian wizards who found their way across the bridge with the armed soldiery. Iban Ja was a thousand years old, the stories went. Iban Ja had never been born, but made from the bodies of ten great wizards who gave their lives knowing that they would be part of the greatest wizard ever to walk the earth, the other stories went. None of them were true and all of them spoke the truth of the Arkhosians’ regard for him.

  He looked down as dawn broke on the thirteenth day and saw the best of the Arkhosian troops, the mighty dragonborn warriors known as the Knights of Kul. A hundred selected from ten thousand, they were the finest foot soldiers in the known world. Any one of them could cut their way through ten men and be laughed at if they got a scratch in the fight.

  In the darkness, the Knights had established a foothold on the Turathian side of the bridge. In the hours before dawn they had fought their way to solid ground on the other side of the bridge, laying waste to the Turathian opposition.

  And as the sun shone from a bed of clouds in the eastern sky, Iban Ja found himself seeing a fresh new telling of a very old story.

  The Knights drove forward, supported by sword and foot of the regular Arkhosian expeditionary force. Behind them, support units set up defensive positions along the ledges of the approach canyon to protect the way back to the bridge. Already that morning the Knights were five hundred yards up the canyon road that, in another hundred miles, would lead to Crow Fork and the market-where, it was said, some of the surviving Noon Gorge dwarves were building labyrinthine dungeons at the request of the market’s council. The Turathian forces were shattered and in full retreat.

  But below the bridge, from the mouths of caves drilled out of the living rock so long-dead Noon Gorge dwarves could build the bridge’s arched buttresses, came Turathian sappers. Some of them were human. Some were tiefling. And some, saw Iban Ja, were cambion. It was not the first time he had seen cambion on the other side of a battlefield. He imagined it would not be the last. Yet seeing them there, at the footings of the bridge, Iban Ja felt as if something vital had escaped him and could never be reclaimed.

  Clouds covered the sun and wind howled down the gorge from the north. The Raven Queen’s affections turned elsewhere as she saw that her favorites would be fed.

  Iban Ja spoke instructions to a stone that carried his voice to every wizard who fought under his command. They turned as one and directed their attacks toward the sappers in the caves, besieging them with magical energies designed to kill the living without damaging the stone underpinnings of the bridge. At that moment, the Turathians played their last card.

  On the walls of the gorge above the bridge, stones began to move. They shifted, spread wings, reared fanged heads on long necks, uncoiled tails tipped with hooked stingers. Ridden by cambion hellswords, these fell wyverns swooped down from the heights to tear into the ranks of Arkhosian wizards. The wizards fought back, but the distraction proved critical. Cambion magi worked magics upon the bodies of their tiefling servants while Iban Ja devoted all of his powers to destroying the wyverns. Incinerated, arrow-shot, lightning-struck, they fell from the sky to die on the stones of the bridge or in the depths of the churning river far below.

  And as Iban Ja and the Arkhosian wizards returned their attention to the cambion magi, a great shudder ran through the stones of the bridge. Cambion magic drew the ghosts of dead dwarves from the stones and their spectral picks crashed into the most vulnerable seams, where buttress met cliffside and Arkhosian engineering met the ageless genius of nature.

  Iban Ja called down a raven that wheeled over the battlefield. “It is your Queen that has done this, is it not?” he demanded.

  The raven squawked but consented to speak. “Is this not an unnatural spring?” it answered. “And does not the
wilderness rebel against the works of mortals? Beware your blame, wizard. Look you to yourself.”

  It cast itself back into the air over the bridge as the last words left its mouth, and the great buttresses on the Turathian side of the gorge slipped, cracked, and fell with a sound like an earthquake into the misty depths of the Gorge of Noon. The span sagged, leaned, split two-thirds of the way across and carried Arkhosian support troops and the bodies of the fallen after the broken buttresses. Unsupported, the remainder of the span jutted creaking out into empty space for a moment longer than Iban Ja thought he could endure-then with a sound like a peal of thunder the entire span broke off and fell end over end into the gorge. The bodies of Iban Ja’s wizard corps fell with it. Those few who managed to fly, and managed to survive the barrage of tiefling arrows, returned to the Arkhosian side to watch in horror as the final part of Bael Turath’s great trap sprang.

  From every cave, every notch, every sheltered space below a fallen rock poured tiefling and human, cambion and lesser devil. Like ants they poured blackly over the rocks, overwhelming the Arkhosian troops and closing like a flood around the island formed by the Knights of Kul. Rallying to a defensive posture, the Knights saw the collapse of the bridge. Instantly they knew what had happened. In the falling of the stones they saw their deaths, and with useless clarity they understood that even the most seasoned of soldiers can fall victim to the thrill of battle.

  It began to snow. The raven that had answered Iban Ja’s questions wheeled over the broken stub of the bridge.

  He killed it with a flick of his fingers. The Raven Queen’s fury would follow him beyond his grave, but Iban Ja did not care for her regard. He rose into the skies over the gorge, flicking aside arrows from the other side, summoning and mastering the wild energies of the storm that blew down the gorge from the great peaks of the Draco Serrata. He did not expect to live through the next hour, but Iban Ja had done a great deal of living; he was interested now in doing a little dying for the empire whose service had dominated his life.