by Alex Irvine
A new campfire blazed up on the sandy spit of Iskar’s Landing. The sun had long since fallen behind the mountains. Down by the river, it was nearly dark under a sky of rich violet streaked with orange near the horizon.
“Teach me that trick,” Vokoun said. “And someone go find the upland men over by the creek. They have spirits. We can’t run the river in the dark, so you have the night to convince me.”
Later, around a fire of their own, Vokoun said, “Once I saved you folk from the yuan-ti. What am I going to be saving you from if I let you on my boat this time?”
“I believe we could have worked things out with the yuan-ti,” Paelias said. “Perhaps the next time we are ambushed, you can observe instead of intervening.”
“Perhaps I will, if only to shut you up, eladrin,” Vokoun said.
“The Road-builder,” Keverel said. “If it is the truth you desire and not a story that will let you pretend to be bolder than you are, there it is. We will carry the Road-builder’s phylactery to Karga Kul. And there, once it has accomplished its last task, we will destroy it. And him with it.”
Vokoun drank and started to speak. Then he thought better of the speech and drank again. After some time, he spoke. “The story is that the Road-builder became a lich.”
“It is true,” Keverel said.
“What happens if I don’t let you on my boat?”
“One of two things. Either we destroy Moidan’s Quill, which is also the Road-builder’s phylactery, and Karga Kul falls to a horde of demons, or we try to get to Karga Kul on foot and run the risk of the Road-builder appearing again before we get there.” Keverel reached out for the bottle and took a drink of his own.
Vokoun took it back, then remembered his manners enough to offer it around before drinking again. “And this phylactery. That’s what brings him back?”
“Until it is destroyed,” Biri-Daar said. “And it can’t be destroyed until we use it in Karga Kul.”
They told stories after that, in turns around the fire. Vokoun began, and spun a comic tale of his ancestors’ first boat, up in the marshes around the great inland sea that was the source of the Whitefall. Paelias picked up the theme of sailing, and told of an eladrin hero who sailed the astral seas of Arvandor in search of a woman stolen from him by Sehanine. Remy listened the entire time trying to figure out if Paelias was talking about himself. When the star elf’s story ended with its hero returning to the Feywild, and from there to the mortal world, without his beloved, Remy felt that he had learned something he might rather not have known. Paelias was a fine companion, and a strong ally in battle. His sorrow, once his story was known, belonged to the company.
He was thinking this while everyone looked at him and he realized it was his turn to tell a story. Having no grand yarns to spin, no epic lies to tell, Remy opened his mouth and said something he had never said before, to anyone. “Once I saw the City of Doors,” Remy said.
It was a secret he had never told anyone, of the time when, running from a gang of older boys, he had leaped across a sewer ditch and skidded on the fog-slick boards he landed on, straight through an open street-level window. He had landed hard, flat on his back, and lain in the darkness trying to get his breath. Outside the window, he heard the other boys laugh-they’d only seen him lose his footing and skid out of sight. When their sounds diminished to silence, Remy rolled over onto hands and knees and looked around to get a sense of whose home or shop he had accidentally invaded. Probably he could climb straight back out with no one ever knowing he had been there; but what would it hurt to take a look around first? If, of course, he wasn’t in the kind of place where a wandering youth could find more trouble than he bargained for. Avankil was full of such places.
Slowly his eyes adjusted to the dimness. The room was narrow and rectangular, with the window in one short side and two doors in the other. The short walls were stone and mortar, slightly damp with the normal condensation of a belowground room, while the long walls were covered with slotted shelves, as if someone had once stored bottles there. Remy could well understand why they no longer did; in this part of Avankil, anything within sight of a window and unprotected by magic or blade would be stolen the moment its owner turned his back. The room was empty now, but knowing Whisker Angle, Remy feared that anything might happen.
All the more reason, perhaps, to get moving and get out of there-but there were those two doors set into the far wall. One clearly led up. A sliver of daylight was visible at its bottom, between door and jamb, and Remy could hear human voices on the floor above, their sound reflecting down the stairs. Three voices, it sounded like, speaking a sailor pidgin Remy recognized but did not understand.
An argument was perfect cover, was it not, for a little exploration?
The second door-it was on the left, and the door met the jamb flush, with no hint of light, noise, or smell from the other side. Remy listened and heard nothing. He opened it, slowly, and when he had opened it halfway he stopped and stared, struck dumb by what was on the other side.
A fat tiefling in a butcher’s apron sorted through a bin of severed wings. “You here about the knucklebones?” he asked gruffly. In one hand he held a long, reptilian wing, with stubby claws at its main flight joint; in the other, a cleaver.
“The what?” Remy said.
“Knucklebones. Wyvern knucklebones. If you’re not here for them, what are you here for?”
“I just-” Remy gestured over his shoulder and glanced back.
The room he had just been in was no longer there.
He spun back around to see the tiefling grinning at him. “Never been here before? An adventurer.” He waggled a cleaver in Remy’s direction. “Lucky you don’t have wings, boy. You’d have walked out of here without them.”
The tiefling pointed to another door beyond an enormous butcher-block table. “Out is that way. Back to where you came from is somewhere out there. Luck.”
“But-”
“Go, boy. Nothing stays in here but me and dead things.”
Remy went. Out the tiefling butcher’s door, he found himself on a strange street. It was wider than most of the squares in Avankil, and everywhere he saw doors. There were round doors with latches set in the middle, double doors made of stone or pebbled black wrought iron; there were doors in the street itself, and doors that seemed to hang just near a structure without being attached to anything. And among those doors moved… everything. Every race Remy had ever seen in Avankil, or read of in the illustrated scrolls he spied in ship captains’ collections or the vizier’s library, or heard stories of in tallow-stinking taverns or beneath an ancient pier swaybacked with age. Every monstrous humanoid or elemental presence, every glimmering manifestation of astral will, every lumbering undead hulk of the Underdark. Remy was in a place that seemed to have no beginning and no end. No sky arched over the doors and storefronts, no sun shone to cast a shadow. Yet there was light, and there were shadows. No vantage point let him see beyond the limits of the city… yet he could look up and beyond, and there he could spy stars and strange luminescent swirls, as if some deity had taken light and made it into icing for a vast and invisible confection.
He looked down again. A detail jumped out at him: next to the doors that he could see-dozens of them!-was carved a symbol. A hand, fingers up, with a teardrop in the center of its palm.
“Or,” commented a passing elemental wisp, “a drop of blood. The Lady is quite taken with the falling of blood and tears.”
Remy started. “The Lady?”
“Ohhh,” crooned the wisp. It was the color of air, visible only as a distortion of what was behind it. Its eyes were blurs. “You are in Sigil yet you know not of the Lady. A delight! How has this happened? No, wait. You opened a door, did you not? In a city on the mortal plane, where you come from. And you found yourself here.”
“Yes,” Remy said. “But-”
“Where is here? Sigil! City of Doors! Crossroads of the Planes!” The wisp swept in on itself, curled into a sp
iral as if aspiring to the colors in the sky. “This is the place that is always between all places,” it went on. “The place from which you can get to any other place in a single step. The place that holds Creation together. The knotted, beating heart at the center of all that exists.”
Then it vanished. Its voice, lingering a moment longer, added, “Or perhaps not.”
Remy walked through the city of doors, seeing in each of them a gateway to a world as large and various as his own. Could it be true? “Boy,” a voice hailed from a half-open door set beneath an overhang carved with a large version of the Lady’s symbol in yellow and red. Remy looked and saw a devil, three-eyed and four-armed, with a tail curling around its feet. “You don’t belong here, do you, boy?”
“I’m here,” Remy said.
The devil clapped, one pair of hands slightly later than the other, creating a delayed echoing effect. In the portion of the sky Remy happened to be looking at over its left shoulder and down a short alley beyond which Sigil apparently vanished quite soon, a star went out. “Excellent response,” it said. “The only response that makes sense, which makes you quite out of character here. It is a point of pride among the citizens of Sigil that they make sense to outsiders rarely, and then only when they hope to gain something from it.”
It clapped all four of its hands on Remy’s upper arms. He tensed, fearing violence-how would he fight a devil in a foreign place, with no weapon and no friends?-but the devil laughed. “You walked through a door you had never seen before, in a place where you had reason to fear for yourself. Is that not so?”
“That’s true,” Remy said.
“True is a word I don’t much like,” the devil said. “So. That is a word. When one speaks of true, one is speaking of morality.”
Remy wasn’t sure what to make of this. “Ha!” the devil crowed. “A boy who knows when to keep his mouth shut. Would you like a way home?”
It waved a hand and the door next to it opened. Through the doorway Remy could see the waterfront of Avankil. The Blackfall meandered, wide and lazy, past the quays. A smell of slack water drifted through the door, becoming one more of the smells Remy had not had time to disentangle from the overwhelming savor of Sigil.
“What’s it going to cost me?” Remy asked.
“You can either kill a man for me or agree to perform an unspecified deed at an unspecified time, which will be no more of a moral transgression than killing a man.” The devil grinned at Remy, clasping all of its hands together. “What say you?”
Remy thought about it. He was thirteen, old enough to know when someone was trying to put something over on him but not quite savvy enough to know what it was. At this moment he knew that no matter what his answer, he was likely to regret it later.
And he very badly wanted to go home.
The door to Avankil shut and disappeared. Only the wall, blank stone grimed with interplanar soot, remained. The devil’s grin spread until Remy thought its head might separate along an invisible axis defined by the meeting point of its upper and lower teeth. “There will come a time when an adventure-minded boy such as yourself might do me a great service. Here.” She held out a hand, palm up. In the center of her palm was a single gold coin.
Remy took it, fearing the consequences if he did not. The moment he lifted it from her palm, the devil vanished. He looked at the coin. It was a perfect featureless disk, with no face of king or emperor on its face.
Remy wandered Sigil until his legs were heavy and his tongue thick. Once a merchant of glass jars offered him a drink of water, but he was afraid to take it. He looked down at the stones of the street and wondered how many different worlds they had come from. Something was coming loose in his head as fatigue took him over. He was unmoored, as Sigil itself was unmoored. Remy was everywhere at once. He was afraid of never finding his way home and afraid to ask anyone where the way home might be.
From the fog inside his head shone a sudden clear realization. If he did not take control, he was never going to find his way out of Sigil. Looking around, Remy saw other wanderers. How long had they been there? One of them, a hunchbacked dwarf woman with long braids tucked into her boots, caught his eye. She knew, Remy thought. She knew him for what he was. She was telling him not to make the error she had made.
He was in a darkened stretch of street. Ahead, several streets crashed together into a broad square, alive with light and smoke. Remy headed for it. He would either find his way home or… for the first time, he realized that he could make his way here, in Sigil, just as he could in Avankil.
All of the worlds were here, each behind a door. Sigil was not a prison; he was not lost there; it was a gate standing open before him. All he had to do was walk through. Remy had good shoes on his feet and a good knife in his belt. He could go anywhere. He would go everywhere. Some men looked for Sigil their entire lives without finding it. Remy had fallen in and now, he was thinking, he didn’t want to climb out. “Pelor with me,” he said softly, and turned to face the next door he saw.
It had no knob, no latch, no visible hinge. What it did have was a slot in the exact center. Next to the door stood a tall and bulbous humanoid who looked as if it had been constructed of potatoes. “The Lady of Pain desires that you leave now,” it said. Roots curled around its mouth and its eyes were black cavities that Remy would have cut out of any potato he saw in a kitchen. Even its breath smelled of root cellars and freshly turned earth.
“No,” Remy said. “I am going to…”
“Perhaps Sigil will welcome you another time.” The potato-man smiled and gestured to the door.
Already Remy was aching for the lost opportunity of Sigil. If only he hadn’t waited, if only he had seized the chance when he’d had it instead of running around like a child looking for his mother.
“Young man,” the potato-man said. “You are awaited elsewhere.”
I could carve you into chips, Remy thought. But he walked to the door and put the demon’s coin in the slot.
And his hand came away damp from the condensation on the inside of the basement room’s one stone wall.
Outside, in the Avankil street where Remy had fled the gang, the normal voices and sounds of the city echoed from storefront to storefront. From the floor above, he heard a man and a woman arguing. Home.
Remy sniffed at his sleeve. Earth, smoke, sulfur, perfumes distilled from plants that grew nowhere on this world…
Sigil!
“Quite a tale, lad,” Vokoun said. “Either there’s depth to your character or a liar’s skill in your tongue.”
Obek clapped Remy on the shoulder, and in the same motion prevented him from leaning forward with a retort to Vokoun’s provocation. “A tale-teller’s skill,” Obek said. “I’ve been to Avankil. What else do these boys have to do when they’re lying around the docks with the rats all day?”
Laughter erupted around the fire, and Remy took the joke in good humor. Coming from Obek it was easier. There was no deceit in him. Nor was there any malice. Tieflings were notorious for both, which either made Obek unusual for his race or meant that the other citizens of the Five Cities didn’t know tieflings very well. “Crow Fork Market reminded me a little of it, but I didn’t want to say anything.”
“Wise,” Lucan commented. “We barely believe you now. Then, before we’d seen you in action, we’d never have taken you seriously.”
“I wasn’t even there, and I can agree with that,” Paelias agreed.
“Is it true?” Vokoun said.
Remy nodded, looking into the depths of the fire. He fancied he could see a tiny salamander, a scout from the Elemental Planes sent to see if the suddenly exposed chisel was of interest to the elemental powers… then it was gone. “Yes,” he said. “It’s true. I’ve never seen it since. I would like to go there again.”
“The Lady of Pain has walking potatoes for servants?” Vokoun looked as if that, more than anything else, was impossible to believe.
“I don’t know what he was, really,” R
emy said. “That’s what he looked like, though.”
“The part that worries me is the devil giving you a coin,” Biri-Daar said. Remy looked at her and could see her measuring him yet again, deciding where his obligations lay, and his loyalties. The story disturbed her, he could tell. It disturbed him as well; how was he to know whether some kind of spell or curse had been placed on him?
“Paelias,” Remy said.
The star elf held up a hand. “Biri-Daar,” he said, “devils have many reasons for doing what they do. There is no taint of the Abyss on Remy, save the chisel.”
“How much more do you need?” Obek joked.
“Silence,” Biri-Daar said. “We weigh the success of our quest here, and the survival of Karga Kul. It is no time for jokes.”
“Every time is a time for jokes,” Obek shot back. “Especially the most serious times.” His sword sang out of its scabbard and hung perfectly level, its point an arm’s length from Remy. “So. Do we kill the boy and take the chisel ourselves? Do we kill the boy and destroy the chisel? Or do we quit this arguing and go on to do what needs to be done?” At each question, Obek turned the blade of his sword, walking the gleam of firelight up and down its length. “Me, I just need to get back into Karga Kul. Whatever makes that happen faster, I am for.”
“Put up your sword, tiefling,” Biri-Daar said evenly.
He looked at her. “I am called Obek.”
After a pause, Biri-Daar took her hand from the hilt of her own sword. “Put up your sword, Obek,” she said.
The blade flashed once more as Obek reversed and sheathed it. “There,” he said. “Done. Now let us go to Karga Kul.” Then he looked at Remy, who had not moved during the whole exchange. “Joke, my friend. It was a joke. No one was ever going to get killed.”