The seal of Karga Kul (dungeons and dragons)

by Alex Irvine

  About an hour after the first sighting, they saw smoke in the sky ahead. An hour later, the road rose next to a tumbling creek until they crested a ridge and discovered the source. There had once been a farmstead there; three or four thatched outbuildings arranged around a central home with stone walls and a beam roof. They could tell it was a beam roof because the charred stumps of some of the beams still angled up from the top edge of the walls. The outbuildings were collapsed into smoking rubble. In the yard just outside the doorway lay a body, facedown. Not far away lay a dog, eviscerated, its limbs cut off and flung away. They approached and Keverel said, “Gnawed the bones. Not just of the dog.”

  “Who lives out here?” Kithri said. “Might as well beg the passing orcs to stop for lunch. Until the ogres eat them in turn.”

  “A bit of respect for the dead,” Biri-Daar said.

  They looked around to see if there were survivors, but found none. “Not a terrible place,” Lucan said. “Fish in the river, deer in the valleys. Enough sun for a garden. I would settle down here. Right at the edge of where the mountains rise up.” Tears stood in the elf’s eyes. “Biri-Daar, I realize that our errand is of terrible import, but if there is an afternoon to spend killing orcs I would consider it a boon.”

  Iriani looked out across the clearing, across the road to where the ridge curled and rose farther into a maze of notched canyons. “An afternoon well spent,” he said.

  From inside the house, where she had gone to ensure there were no survivors, Biri-Daar emerged. “At times, one must put aside an errand to spend an afternoon in charity.”

  The orcs’ track wasn’t hard to follow. It led across the meandering river at a broad ford less than a mile along the road from the sacked homestead. From there it climbed at an angle away from the road, following an old landslide scar up to an overhung ledge where a pair of orcs stood cracking bloody bones in their teeth. Lucan dropped one of them with an arrow and Remy the other with a slung stone. Immediately Kithri appeared from the scrub at the side of the ledge to make sure both were dead. At a hand signal from her, the rest of the party made their way to the ledge. The overhung hollow opened into a cave. Without hesitation they fell into the order of battle that had already become their unspoken habit. Biri-Daar and Keverel led, flanked by Lucan and Remy, with Kithri and Iriani immediately behind. They stormed down the main passage, kicking aside heaps of stinking refuse and making it all the way to the first split before they encountered resistance.

  Surging out from the pitch-dark depths of both branches, the orcs swarmed them. As soon as it happened, their order of battle meant nothing. Orcs were everywhere, trampling over their dead to overwhelm the invaders. They were subhuman, savage beasts living in filth, destroying all that was beautiful. All of Remy’s childhood stories came to life; he cut them down as fast as they got within range of his sword, and still there were more. Light blazed along the ceilings of the passages, revealing broken-off stalactites and the teeming forms of the orcs. Keverel had brought the light, and in the sudden illumination Iriani could see where all of his comrades were. Remy saw him step off to one side, putting himself against the wall; Remy went with him, anticipating that the wizard would be planning something magical and would need protection to complete it.

  He was right. As soon as he got there, he deflected challenges from a cluster of orcs and then the branch passageway exploded in a crackle of fire that incinerated every orc in sight. The fire vanished and the rush of air drew the air from Remy’s lungs.

  In the other passage, Biri-Daar and Lucan were hewing their way through the remaining orcs. The rest of the party joined them and together they punched into the chamber at the heart of the orcs’ lair… just as the surviving orcs scattered and a pair of ogres appeared, flanking a larger orc with ritualized scars surrounding the open socket of the eye he had sacrificed to his god. “Eye of Gruumsh,” Lucan said. “You, orc! Elf here!”

  As clumsy a ploy as it was, it worked perfectly. The god of the elves, Corellon, had gouged the eye from the orc patron Gruumsh. The orcs who mimicked that wound nurtured a hatred of elves and all things elven.

  The Eye of Gruumsh said something in Orcish and the ogres lumbered forward, both to protect it and to destroy the elf interloper. Biri-Daar met one of them head on, stepping inside the looping swing of its morningstar and opening its guts with a hooked thrust. The other ogre swatted Lucan down to his knees and the Eye of Gruumsh sprang closer for the kill, its battle cry nearly drowning out the dying roars of the gutted ogre. It had its spear raised, its mouth open, its one good eye wide in triumph-until Kithri’s thrown knife flashed across the chamber and struck at an angle up through the roof of its mouth.

  Its cry trailed off and the spear thrust drove through Lucan’s shoulder instead of his ribs, the spear head snapping off on the stone floor. Staggering, the Eye of Gruumsh took another blow as a second knife snapped into the hollow of its throat under the jaw. It dropped straight down, still gripping the haft of the broken spear.

  Remy and Biri-Daar pressed the remaining ogre. If there were any more orcs about, they had fled into the deeper recesses of the cave. The ogre fought with a fire-hardened wooden club, broken blades hammered into its head. Knowing it was outnumbered, the ogre backed toward an opening in the cave, forcing them to approach it from the front. Its club made a heavy whoosh with every swing, each powerful enough to splinter a row of skulls and fan their brains out across the nearest wall.

  Even an ogre’s strength has limits. Biri-Daar, fearless with the strength of her god, pressed near the limit of the club’s range. She timed the swing and the backswing-once, twice. On the third, she stepped inside and jammed her sword up under the ogre’s armpit. The ogre clamped the wounded arm around the dragonborn paladin, crushing her to it in a suffocating embrace. The club dropped; with its free hand, the ogre tore Biri-Daar’s sword free of its flesh and threw it away.

  Then Keverel was there, smashing his mace into the arm that held Biri-Daar. With him came Remy, his blade flicking out in search of the vulnerable gaps in the ogre’s hide armor. Iriani protected the rear, destroying the occasional straggling orc as it appeared.

  Last, and most lethally, came Kithri, dancing between the ogre’s legs to open the artery on the inside of its thigh. She was fast, and the ogre was terribly wounded-still it was fast for its size, catching her with a spastic kick that smashed her into the wall. She cried out and rolled away as the mortally wounded ogre toppled against the wall above her and slid down, its wounded leg unable to hold its weight and its lifeblood spilling in a thick fall from shoulder and thigh. Remy stepped in again, thrusting deep into the pit of its stomach. It flailed at him, missing, and Biri-Daar fell away from it, fighting free of its grasp as it slid down the wall and died.

  Before it had drawn its last breath, Remy vaulted the body and kneeled next to Kithri. Her face was wild with pain, her teeth bared and gritted. When he picked her up to carry her back to Keverel, she cried out again. “Hush,” Lucan said heartlessly, whatever native tact he possessed temporarily driven out by his own wound. “You’ll draw whatever else lives back in these caves.”

  Kithri might have said many things. Instead she took his advice, clamping her mouth shut even when Remy laid her down on the hard stone next to Lucan. She did manage to glare at him; he winked in return.

  While Keverel did what he could to heal them both, Biri-Daar called Remy over. “We need to follow these two passages as far as we can, to make sure we got them all,” she said. “There have been no young, which means this is a raiding party. Probably they only planned to stay here a few weeks, until they had despoiled the area. If we had gotten here a few days earlier…” She trailed off and Remy instantly knew what she was thinking.

  If they had not stopped to save him, they would have found the orcs before they destroyed the homestead back in the ridge clearing. Saving his life had cost the lives of anyone there.

  “It’s a fool’s choice,” Iriani said softly. He too could se
e where Biri-Daar’s thoughts had gone. “When you can tell the future, paladin of Bahamut, then you may reprimand yourself for telling it incorrectly.”

  Biri-Daar looked at him, then around at the carnage. “Let us search and make sure this place is cleansed of its filth,” she said.

  “And do bring back whatever you find that is both light and valuable,” Lucan added. He caught his breath as Keverel sank a needle into the meat of his shoulder. “Hurry, before this murderous cleric puts an end to me.”

  “We should have such fortune,” Kithri muttered. Her voice sounded odd to Remy but he put the thought out of his mind. Biri-Daar had ordered him to clear out the back tunnels, and clear out the back tunnels he would. Keverel knew his business.

  Remy found nothing in the rear tunnels, even when assisted by a cantrip of Iriani’s that set a pleasant light glowing from the buckle of his belt. Trash, bones, filth. Nothing else. He returned the way he had come, carefully, and found both Lucan and Kithri sitting up. “Time to go,” Iriani said.

  “This is an awful place,” Lucan groused. “Odor enough to kill you dead, orcs and ogres nearly enough to kill you all over again…”

  “… And nothing to show for it,” Kithri finished for him.

  “Perhaps it is just that the two most larcenous members of our group did not participate in the search,” Biri-Daar suggested without looking at either of them. She was working with a row of damaged scales on her arm, picking loose the bits that would not heal.

  Everyone else in the cave looked at one another to be sure that the paladin had in fact told a joke. They were never sure.

  It was true that their search had yielded very little that was valuable, and of that virtually nothing that was light. The only thing of any value was an enormous mirror framed in what looked like silver. Iriani had found it leaning up against a dead end in one of the side tunnels. He could detect no magic in it. “Break off the frame and let’s take it with us,” Kithri said.

  Everyone ignored her. Some of them did take the chance to regard the progress of their beards. Of the three who had to shave, none had since leaving Crow Fork Market. “Soon we’ll all look like dwarves,” Iriani said upon seeing himself. “Dwarves who have spent time on the rack.”

  When they emerged into daylight again and found their horses cropping the brush at the edge of the river, less than two hours had passed since Remy and Lucan had cut down the two orcs snacking on the ledge. The sun was dropping toward the western peaks. “We’ve wasted the afternoon on this,” Keverel said. “None of us wants to camp so close to that nest, I would guess.”

  “You would guess correctly,” Biri-Daar said. “But few of us would wish to go much farther.”

  “Then over the next pass,” Lucan said.

  Kithri spat from her horse. “This pass, that pass. What difference does it make?”

  “Over the next pass is into the final climb toward Iban Ja’s bridge,” Lucan said. “I don’t think we’ll find any orcs or ogres up there.”

  “Why not?” Remy asked.

  “The cambions and hobgoblins scare them away. Or slaughter them,” Iriani said.

  Nodding, Lucan added, “That’s if the sorrowsworn don’t get them first.”

  “Sorrowsworn?” Remy had never heard the name. Or term.

  “Perhaps you will have the good fortune not to find out,” Iriani said. Nobody would say anything else about it. They rode on, and camped beyond the next pass, alighting from their horses just as the last of the sun vanished behind the mountains, its dying rays slanting up into the sky.

  As it turned out, they did not reach Iban Ja’s bridge until the second day after they cleaned out the lair of orcs. Biri-Daar was reluctant to push the pace while Kithri and Lucan were recovering from their wounds. When they did come to the bridge, Remy realized that everything he had heard about it-and by that time he had heard quite a lot-had utterly failed to prepare him for the reality of seeing it for himself.

  They had just stopped for lunch at the head of a slot canyon through which the road angled down, following the canyon floor. Already Remy could hear a distant roar, but despite what Biri-Daar and Lucan said, he could not believe that was the sound of a tributary river to the Blackfall, rumbling from the bottom of a gorge said to be a thousand feet deep. “What is it really?” he asked with an uncertain smile. They shook their heads and said if he didn’t believe them, he would just have to see for himself.

  Which now he was.

  The road ended in a tumble of scree that fell a few dozen yards to the lip of the gorge itself. Remy couldn’t see its bottom from where they stood. Around them reared up impassable walls of stone, with the narrowest of ledges on the left side of the scree.

  And ahead of them, hanging impossibly in the empty air, was the Bridge of Iban Ja. Remy tried to count the stones, but could not. Some of them were larger than the house where he had last taken a meal in Avankil. Some were no larger than a man. Gathered together, they were a mosaic impression of a bridge, the gaps between them sometimes narrow enough for a halfling to tiptoe across and sometimes wide enough that no sane mortal would endeavor the jump without wings. Bits of cloth on sticks fluttered from cracks in some of the rocks, the guideposts of long-past travelers. All of the stones moved slightly, rocking in the winds that howled through the Gorge of Noon as if they floated on the surface of a gentled ocean, or a wide and flat stretch of river. Snow clung to some of them, and drifted in sculpted shapes across the flat edges of others.

  “Well,” Kithri said, “now we’ve seen it. Biri-Daar, what did you say the other way across this gorge was?”

  “It involves traveling fifty leagues off the road to a ford,” Biri-Daar said. “We have no time. I have crossed Iban Ja’s bridge before. It held me. It will hold you.”

  “And by this point, crossing it is no longer a matter of choice,” Keverel chimed in.

  “Is that so,” Kithri began. She saw Keverel pointing back up the road, turned to see what he was indicating, and saw-as Remy did at that exact moment-the band of tieflings standing in the road behind them. As they watched, the band of perhaps a dozen was fortified with ten times as many hobgoblin marauders.

  Remy had seen fewer tieflings than dragonborn. The dragonborn in Avankil had their clan hall, and conducted business when they had business to conduct. The city’s tieflings, perhaps sensitive to the permanent stain on their heritage, kept to themselves when they could. When they dealt with non-tieflings, their bravado and short tempers resulted in vexed interactions. Everyone Remy had ever known, from Quayside toughs to Philomen the vizier himself, had warned him to steer clear of tieflings.

  Now here he was, his back to a pathway of rocks floating in midair, facing a large number of exactly those creatures he had been told his entire life to avoid. Remy touched the box hanging at his side and wondered what it might have contributed to this turn of events. He imagined that, if they survived the next hour, Lucan and the others might have similar questions.

  “It seems that some of these tieflings still believe they fight for Bael Turath,” Lucan observed.

  “And that we, somehow, wear the colors of Arkhosia,” Kithri added. “Well, we do have a dragonborn with us.”

  “It gets worse,” Lucan said.

  “I can hardly see how,” Kithri said.

  “I can,” Iriani said. “Out there on the bridge, see that? That is a cambion magus.”

  Something about his tone struck up a quiet, creeping fear in Remy’s mind. Iriani, who had faced down everything they had seen thus far without batting an eye, now paused. “Devil’s offspring,” Iriani said. “You must not speak to it. These magi have the gift of deceit. They would talk any of you right off the bridge.”

  “You’re assuming any of us are going on the bridge,” Kithri said. She was up on a rock at the very edge of the cliff, looking down into the gorge. “If,” she added, “you can call it a bridge. Whoever named it, I’m guessing, had never laid eyes on it.”

  “I read once t
hat Iban Ja’s ghost lives inside one of the stones,” Keverel said. “One wonders whether he would be an ally or foe.”

  More tieflings and hobgoblins spilled from crevices in the canyon walls. “Time to find out,” Biri-Daar said. “Unless we’d rather fight our way through them and go back to Toradan.”

  “I think I would rather do that,” Kithri said. “But I also think you were making a bad attempt at a joke.”

  “And I think that your sense of humor is not nearly as well-developed as you assume,” Biri-Daar said. “Iriani. Let us go and rid the world of a cambion.”

  She leaped to the first block and crossed it in three steps. Iriani followed. As they stepped across the next gap, the hobgoblins gathered at the end of the road charged with a roar. Behind them, the tieflings cocked crossbows and fired, getting the range to the nearest part of the bridge. Kithri danced down the rock face to the edge of the scree, flicking a stream of daggers at the mass of hobgoblins before she made a running jump toward the first stone of Iban Ja’s bridge. She landed at the stone’s edge and tumbled, springing to her feet. Right behind her came Lucan, nocking and firing arrows with uncanny elf grace as he picked his way backward down the scree before firing off a last shot and turning to skip across the void to the stone.

  Shoulder to shoulder, Remy and Keverel backed their way toward the edge of the cliff, skirting the rim of the scree slope to the place Kithri had selected for her leap. “My ancestors were citizens of Bael Turath,” the cleric said. “We were one of the few families who refused to take part in the diabolical pact that created these tieflings. I do believe they would hold that against me if they knew.”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t tell them,” Remy said.