The seal of Karga Kul (dungeons and dragons)

by Alex Irvine

  Greetings were exchanged. Leini and his companions were barely civil, but they did not challenge Paelias directly. “Follow us,” said Paelias. “Even elves with Leini’s manners would not refuse hospitality to tiefling-killing strangers.”

  “And cambion magus-killing,” Kithri said.

  “Very good,” Paelias said. He winked and even Remy could see that in his eyes was something of the color of starlight. “For that we might even be able to find some wine.”

  Eladrin, Remy thought. If he had always thought of orcs as creatures of story more than life, he had been certain that eladrin were figments of storytelling imagination. They were said to be celestial knights, walkers of the planes, emissaries of divine powers, kin to the elves though not entirely elf. Yet here was one, tall and magnificent, pouring him a goblet of wine around a fire that warded off the chill of the highland woods. “One needs these wood-dweller elves to kill off the demonic riffraff,” Paelias was saying. “They aren’t much for company, though. I watched part of your engagement at the bridge today. You might be much better company.”

  “You watched…” Biri-Daar broke off and nodded to herself.

  “That’s why they didn’t follow us,” Kithri said.

  “Well, it wasn’t just me. The tieflings know that any elf in these woods will hunt them down and send them back across the bridge without their skins.” Paelias drank. “But enough about these woods. What’s the news from across the gorge?”

  He looked at Remy. “You’re a young one. Where do you come from and how did you get tangled up with this motley band?”

  Remy told the story, leaving out the details of what he carried and who had sent him. Paelias watched him as he spoke, and listened carefully, and by the time he had told the story Remy was sure that Paelias knew not just that Remy had lied but what he had lied about and why. There was something in the demeanor of an eladrin-or this eladrin, anyway. The star elves, as they were called in Remy’s childhood fables, were mighty figures, passing where they wished among different planes and able to see through the deceits of mortal and immortal alike.

  “A fine tale,” Paelias said. “And you, paladin. What has Karga Kul for you-except a homecoming?”

  Biri-Daar frowned. “How would you know where I was hatched?”

  “All dragonborn wear a bit of their birth shell somewhere on their bodies,” Paelias answered. He drank again. “But as far as I have heard, it is only the dragonborn of Karga Kul-the descendants of the mighty Knights of Kul-who dangle their bits of shell in the air as a remembrance of the Bridge of Iban Ja.”

  Remy saw the dangling earring in Biri-Daar’s right ear. He had never paid attention to it before, but now Paelias’s words had opened up an entirely new understanding of the dragonborn paladin and her demeanor out on the bridge.

  “You have heard accurately,” Biri-Daar said. “Many stray bits of lore have stuck to the inside of your head, Paelias.”

  “Not all of it is stray,” the star elf answered. “I practice the magical arts, and as you can see, I am eladrin and therefore not entirely welcome among these elves.” Paelias walked a coin across his fingers and back before flipping it into the air, where it disappeared. “The Feywild is a little too much of sameness for me. Here, in the mortal world… I find the change exciting, the living and dying, the way that every being here knows of its mortality. Karga Kul…” Paelias mused. “I have never seen the cities of the Dragondown Coast, although there are cities across the ocean where my name might still be remembered.

  “But you are tired and I am keeping you up for my own amusement. You must sleep, and grieve in what ways your traditions demand on the first night of a loss. In the morning we will talk further of Karga Kul. And,” he finished with another wink in Remy’s direction, “of messengers rescued in the desert.”

  In the morning Remy woke feeling more refreshed than he would have thought possible. The forest air, the clean bed… the longer he was apart from civilization, he thought, the more he desired its trappings. Perhaps the adventurer’s life was not for him. Coming out of the cabin where Paelias had decreed they be put up for the night, Remy passed a group of elves gambling with what looked like ancient arrowheads as chips. He nodded to be polite, but expected no response and got none. Across the cleared center of the camp, he saw Paelias sitting with the rest of the group.

  “You slept late,” Kithri said. “The rest of us have already been to Karga Kul and back.”

  “Only in our minds, only in our minds,” Keverel said.

  With a snap of his fingers, Paelias said, “That’s what planning is, going somewhere in your mind so when you get your body there you can get it out again.” He shook his head. “Karga Kul. Strange place.”

  “You said last night you had never been there,” Biri-Daar reminded him.

  “And you were kind enough to observe last night that I have much in the way of lore stuck to the inside of my head,” Paelias answered with a smile. “We are both correct. I would, however, like to see Karga Kul. What say you?”

  “Let’s talk it over,” Kithri said.

  Lucan and Paelias exchanged a glance. “Excuse us,” Lucan said.

  Nodding and retreating, Paelias said, “Of course. I will be at our meeting place by the road. Yea or nay, inform me there.”

  The first vote was three to two against. Remy, Lucan, and Kithri didn’t trust the eladrin. “And why should we?” Kithri asked. “He appears, wants to know our story, wants to come along at the drop of a hat… if you ask me, this is some trick because of Remy.”

  “Because of me?” Remy repeated. He was confused.

  “What you carry,” Lucan amended. “I agree. At least I agree that this is a possibility we must consider. Why would anyone want to come along with us when we’re probably all going to go off and die?”

  “We’re not going to go off and die,” Biri-Daar said. “We have a sacred trust and we will fulfill it.”

  “Except if we go off and die. Like Iriani.”

  “Iriani,” Keverel said quietly, “is precisely why we could use someone like Paelias. The god provides.”

  Other eladrin had ringed them in while they conversed; already Remy could tell them from the elves. The Feywild clung to them even in this world, as if they brought a bit of it with them whatever plane or region their bodies occupied. One of them stepped forward and spoke. “We do not endorse Paelias’s desire,” she said. “He is flighty and foolish and possesses powers whose extent and purpose he does not know.”

  “Sounds like the rest of us,” Kithri said.

  “Once before, Paelias left this wood in search of adventure,” the eladrin said after staring Kithri into silence. “When he returned, it was twenty years before he would speak of what had happened.”

  “And what had happened?” Lucan asked.

  “He got a number of his companions killed,” the eladrin said. “Because, as I have said, he is flighty and foolish. If you would take him with you, you must know this. We found it our duty to tell you.”

  “Does anyone around here have anything good to say about him?” Kithri asked.

  With a shrug, the eladrin answered, “Perhaps. But you will find no one here who would trust Paelias with his life.”

  They traded with the elves before leaving, and the elves cheated them mercilessly, reserving their most ruthless bargains for Lucan. He had his eye on a pair of boots since his had been badly torn in the bridge fighting. “Oh, these boots are powerful,” the elf cobbler said. “You will move silent as a cat and your enemies will think you are a shadow.”

  Lucan bought them, cursing the cobbler and the entire race of elves as he paid the exorbitant price. “This is more than your share of what we’ve won thus far. It puts you in debt to us,” Biri-Daar observed.

  “Oh, fear not,” Lucan said, putting on the new boots. “I’ll work for my keep.”

  Five horses and tack for the long trek ahead of them, plus replacements for gear that had worn out or been broken on the tre
k so far-oil, torches, flint and steel, fresh waterskins-took all the gold they had. They rode away from the elf encampment feeling cheated and still feeling the cloud of Iriani’s death. Paelias, seeing them approach the road, spurred his mount to meet them. “Let me guess,” he said. “They told stories about me and then swindled you at market.”

  “You were watching,” Kithri said.

  “No,” Paelias said. “That is what they do. The elves of these woods don’t like me because I come from the Feywild and they don’t like the Feywild. The other eladrin don’t like me because I like this world a little too much. Probably you voted among yourselves that you don’t want me along. That’s fine. I will ride with you for a while. You can’t stop me unless you want to fight, and if we fight it will end badly for all of us. So. Let us ride. Yes?”

  The five survivors of the battle on Iban Ja’s bridge looked at each other. “All right. Yes,” Biri-Daar said after a long moment. “You may ride with us for a while.”

  BOOK III

  THE CROW ROAD

  They emerged from the elves’ forest the next morning. The country around them was still wooded, but more sparsely. Sunlight reached the ground there, and the air was heavy with the scents of alpine summer. “Now we’re on the Crow Road,” Lucan said. He pointed up to the trees that lined the road, and Remy saw them: crows standing sentinel, one in the top branches of each tree.

  Mindful of the story he had heard about how Iban Ja’s bridge had gotten the way it was, he asked, “Are those crows or ravens?”

  Lucan laughed. “Most people can’t tell the difference. These are crows. But you’ll see ravens along the way. You’ll see just about everything if you travel the Crow Road from one end to the other.”

  “And what is at the other end?”

  “Well, that depends. Either you get off before the end and work your way through the Lightless Marsh to… this sounds strange, but there’s a place where the Lightless Marsh isn’t lightless anymore. That’s the best way I can explain it. You get to that place, and you realize that you have somehow re-emerged into the world from wherever you were before. Which, if you’re traveling the Crow Road, is everywhere. And anywhere.”

  “And if you don’t get off? If you see the Crow Road through all the way to its end?” Remy pressed.

  “Well,” said Lucan slowly, “then you reach the Inverted Keep.”

  “The Inverted Keep?” Paelias looked amazed. “Really? I understood that to be a legend.”

  “Most people in the Dragondown would say the same about Iban Ja’s bridge,” Lucan said. “But they are both real.”

  “Most of them would also say it about the Crow Road,” Keverel added.

  Paelias nodded and scanned the treetops for more crows. “True enough. Yet here we are.”

  “Is it called the Crow Road because crows sit in the trees?” Remy asked. “They do that everywhere.”

  “It’s called the Crow Road…” Kithri started, then stopped. She looked at Lucan.

  “What?” he said.

  “You tell the story,” Kithri said. “If you don’t, you’ll just complain about how one of us does it wrong.”

  In the years before Arkhosia and Bael Turath put their stamp on the world, a great and now forgotten empire arose in the highlands between the Blackfall and Whitefall rivers. So long ago did it rise and fall that even most of its ruins are destroyed and gone, and its languages and arts, its deeds both villainous and glorious, are lost. All that remains of this vanished empire is the Crow Road.

  Ancient records of Bael Turath and Arkhosia speak of it and describe it exactly as it appears to the adventurer of today: a road whose stones no frost can heave, which even buried under mudslides centuries old looks as if it was built yesterday when dug out again. It is a road to outlast the ages.

  And on it the traveler will experience things that exist on no other road.

  The story is that the nameless empire contained a great builder, who wished not only to build roads across the face of the mortal world, but between the planes and other realms as well. The folklore of this people-this is one of very few things known about them-held that crows and ravens had commerce with all of the realms. Therefore, after the builder surveyed his route but before he lay the first stone, he brewed a great enchantment using all of the magical might his empire’s wizards could muster… and he taught the crows how to understand human speech.

  Then he learned their secrets. “I have given you a gift, crows,” he said. “Now in return you may tell me the secret of your ability to perceive and travel to all realms, whether astral or abyssal, elemental or fey.”

  But the crows were crows, and would not tell. Have you ever tried to convince a crow to do anything? To this day, when you speak in the vicinity of a crow, or a raven, be careful. Say only what you would not fear to have repeated in front of your enemies.

  Great grew the builder’s fury. Eventually he reasoned that if he could not get the answers from the crows while they were alive, he would learn it from what happened when they were dead. A bounty went out through the empire, and dead crows began arriving at the castle where the builder had his plans. At first they arrived a few at a time, brought by the bored children of local farmers. Then, when word spread that the builder paid the bounty he promised, crows started to arrive by the saddlebag-full, and then in sacks large enough that mules brought them to the builder’s door. He paid, and paid, and paid. Soon the crows had learned to stay away, but they had also learned why, and from that moment forward the crows were sworn enemies of the builder and of his road.

  He had one more card yet to play, however. When he brought his crews out to the edge of the elves’ dark wood and dug the first stretch of the road’s bed, he laid the body of a crow under every tenth stone.

  Now the crows hated the road and the builder, but the road was also a crows’ burial ground and they flocked to it because-though they might be larcenous, fickle, and cruel-crows honor their dead. The road stretched mile after mile, and every man or dwarf, halfling or elf-every mortal being that died building the road was buried under its stones. Walking it, the builder decreed, would be a voyage that paralleled the path between worlds.

  Of course he was quite mad by this time, and grew madder as the road went on. The builder ordered exotic beasts of the Shadowfell and Elemental Chaos, the Feywild and the Abyss, all of the planes. He ordered them brought to the road and there he killed them and buried them beneath its freshly laid stones. And each of those deaths permeated the stones, and brought a bit of the other realms to the road.

  Over it all watched the crows, since the builder had so many that he still buried one under every tenth stone.

  At last the road reached its juncture with an even older road that led along the path of the Whitefall. He could have stopped there, but the builder had dead crows yet, and a few of the strangest unnameable creatures the magical hunters of other planes could bring him. He built onward, and buried his last crow under the final stone of the road, at the edge of a bluff overlooking a bend in the Whitefall. There he thought he could rest, and there he built himself a keep that would be his last building, where he could grow old looking out over the road he had built.

  “So that’s the Inverted Keep, isn’t it?” Remy asked.

  Lucan nodded. “That’s what the story says.”

  “How did it get inverted? What happened to the builder?”

  “Those are other stories,” Lucan said. “I’m tired of telling stories. Let’s ride, and let’s look out for what the crows get up to along this road.”

  “Sounds like the crows are the least of our problems,” Kithri said.

  “Some of them are shadowravens,” Lucan said.

  Kithri nodded. “See?”

  “But there are no sorrowsworn around because no great battle has ever been fought on the Crow Road. No general has ever kept an army together along its path.”

  “Why would a general have wanted to come this way?” Biri-Daar wondered. “Bet
ween here and Karga Kul there is nothing.”

  Lucan took a drink to wet his throat after the story. When he was done he said, “Who other than generals knows why generals do anything?”

  Keverel leaned over toward Remy. “This, you see, is why none of us became soldiers.”

  For the rest of the day they rode. Remy turned over in his mind the idea that Biri-Daar was a descendant of the Knights of Kul. How was it possible to know things like that? Iban Ja was a name in a story. Even the archivists of Arkhosia were unsure when he had lived, which meant they were unsure when the bridge had fallen.

  What history might lie behind Keverel, or Kithri?

  What, Remy wondered, might lie behind me?

  He knew little about his own family. His mother Melendra had died five years before, when he was fourteen and by the laws of Avankil a man. Since then he had slept at the docks, usually on ships that had been abandoned or whose captains had died onshore. It took the Avankil authorities quite a while to track down and auction off those ships. In the meantime they served very well as a protected place to sleep for the urchin youth of the city. Remy had avoided the gangs by spending just enough time at the keep for the gang leaders not to trust him, but also to decide not to kill him… which he could have made difficult because a year after his mother died was when he had bought his first sword.

  Of his father he knew nothing but stories. His mother had told him that his father was a sailor on one of the fast ships that escorted valuable cargoes on the cross-Gulf run between Furia and Saak-Opole. This route often ran afoul of pirates at the Kraken’s Gate, part of the archipelago at the mouth of the Dragondown Gulf. To hear Remy’s mother tell it, his father had fought through the pirates a dozen times and more, and had seen things in the waters beyond the Kraken’s Gate that he lacked the words to describe. Physically, she said, Remy resembled his father more and more as he grew older. He wondered what she would say now that he was grown. He wondered whether his father was alive, squinting into this same sunset from the deck of a ship in the Gulf-or dead, his bones long since sunk into the seabottom muck far away from the light, deeper than even the sahuagin will venture…