The seal of Karga Kul (dungeons and dragons)

by Alex Irvine

  “This whole thing has been madness,” Paelias said.

  “We run the rapids,” Biri-Daar said. “It’s too late to do anything else.”

  Vokoun surprised Remy then. Rather than refusing, or arguing, he shrugged and signaled the oarsmen. “Very well!” Vokoun said. “For dying, one day’s as good as the next.”

  He might have said more, but the sound of the rapids reached them, and there was nothing else to say.

  The moon was almost directly overhead. In its waxing glow, the rapids of the lower Whitefall glowed a nearly incandescent violet. The ten adventurers on the boat could have linked arms and spanned the distance from canyon wall to canyon wall-and the river itself was narrower yet by twenty feet of fallen boulders and gravel. Half a mile upstream, the river was more than a hundred feet wide. Squeezed down to one third of its width, it surged and boomed over rocks the size of houses, with the walls spray-wetted for twenty feet above the river’s surface. Vokoun’s boat moved faster as if chasing the current ahead. “Oars in the water!” he cried. Remy and Obek looked at each other, not knowing what he meant; simultaneously they looked at the two surviving halfling oarsmen, both of whom were dragging their oars at an angle away from the boat. Remy did the same, and the boat swung into the center of the channel, drawn by the pull of the water piling over itself into the first chute of the rapids.

  Remy had always lived on flat water, the Blackfall Estuary that stretched miles wide away from quays of Avankil. He had never seen rapids like these. The water ahead, as far as he could see under the moonlight, was white foam intermittently broken by darkness that could be either water or stone. Vokoun leaned out over the bow. Paelias was up next to him; the halfling called out something Remy couldn’t understand and Pealias looked back. “Row!” he shouted. “Row, for your lives!”

  We want to go faster? Remy wondered. But the halflings were digging into the water, and they had survived this run before. He dug in, and saw Obek doing the same. The boat leaped forward again, and just as quickly swung sideways. Without warning Remy and Obek were on the downstream side of the boat. The halflings dug hard, trying to straighten out the boat as Obek and Remy dragged their oars. The boat started to pivot back-and an unseen rock tore the oar from Obek’s hands. He lunged after it, overbalancing and dragging the downstream gunwale perilously close to the water level. Vokoun was shouting something that Remy couldn’t hear. Remy hauled back on Obek, barely holding onto his own oar with one hand as he tangled the other in Obek’s belt. “Back in the boat!” Biri-Daar and the Halflings were screaming as Remy leaned back into the boat’s middle and Obek hung over the edge grasping vainly after the oar that had already vanished into the darkness. Vokoun and Keverel joined the clamor as Biri-Daar got a grip on one of Obek’s legs. The tiefling, knowing the oar was lost, was trying to get back in, but he had nothing to grasp and if he reached back his face dipped into the water.

  “High side!” Vokoun screamed again and again.

  The boat swung so close to a group of boulders that Remy could have reached out and touched them, had he a free hand-but Obek, closer yet to the rocks, shoved the boat away with both hands and used the same shove to arch himself back, getting just enough of his weight close enough to the boat that Remy and Biri-Daar could haul him the rest of the way in. “Row! Row! High side!” Vokoun and Paelias screamed.

  Remy and Obek flung themselves up and across the width of the raft, bringing it back to level with a crash and fountain of spray. Some of their gear went overboard, but in the dark Remy couldn’t tell what it was. After that everything was the roar of cold water over black stone, the sting of spray, the ache and tremble of muscles fighting the current. Remy slowly felt himself turning into a sort of golem, rowing when Paelias yelled row and doing anything else only when told… a rowing golem, made to move boats through dangerous mazes of broken stone and surging water. Spasms racked his back. His hands were partly numb and partly torn with blisters that broke, bleeding onto the oar and into the water. Yet he rowed when he was told. Beside him Obek tried to row with his shield, his harsh devilish features set in a mask of angry determination.

  Everyone began to scream. Remy could not hear what they were saying. He looked up and saw that the entire river was pouring into a single chute, narrow enough that the boat turned sideways would dam it up, the water charging up the rock walls that bound it in tongues of spray taller than the obelisks at Crow Fork Junction. The boat seemed, incredibly, to rise as it rode the cresting volume of the river through this choked-off throat-Remy thought, in his exhausted golem’s haze, of a rope swing that hung from a long cypress branch over a deep pool just upstream of Avankil’s old city walls. When you swung, there was a moment of perfect stillness as you reached the top of your arc; the river spread below like a sheet of tin on cloudy days, like a blazing mirror when the sun shone; and you fell endlessly until you broke its surface and plunged through the deeper and deeper shades of greeny brown, the cold of the Blackfall’s deepest belly just reaching your feet before you again hung suspended, weightless, and began to kick to the surface with burning lungs and schemes aborning about how to cut in line to do it again faster, sooner next time…

  And in the next moment they were gliding across the unbroken glassy surface of a deep, wide pool. The sound of the rapids was already fading. The boat turned in a slight eddy, finding its way to slack water in the shadow of a sheer rock wall that disappeared straight down into the depths. Remy reached out his oar to push the boat away from the wall. “Row,” Vokoun said. His voice, worn down to a deathbed wheeze, lacked its usual commanding tone… but they rowed. The boat heeled around and pointed downstream again.

  By dawn, they were in a stretch of river that Remy would have sworn was just upstream of Avankil, in a region known as the Striped Bank. There the steep hills on either side of the river, and looming steeply over the tributaries that ran cold and fast down from the hills, were horizontally streaked in fantastic shades that Remy had only otherwise seen in the frozen sherbets mixed in the keep for Philomen and others in the nobility of Avankil.

  Here, too, the streaks in the canyon cut were visible, and in similar colors; and also here, the river itself ran smoothly between them, even if the smaller streams that fell into it tumbled over themselves in their eagerness. But downstream, Remy knew, was not Avankil but Karga Kul. They fled toward it with death knights on their trail, and Erathis only knew what other minions of Orcus.

  Erathis. He had sworn by Erathis.

  It was dawn. The rising sun picked out the colors in the canyon walls, blinding Remy with beauty on this morning he had not expected to live to see… and he was invoking another god. Empty of feeling, he examined this problem. Why had it happened? Would it happen again?

  “Keverel,” he said, but when the cleric looked his way Remy knew he could not say more about the true nature of the conflict he felt.

  “Remy.”

  A long time passed. Keverel did not press him and the boat was silent. After the previous evening and night, none of them had much to say. Obek rowed with his shield until Vokoun told him to stop. “Remy can row worth the two on the other side-not,” he was quick to add, “because they’re halflings, but because they’re lazy. Too lazy even to be killed by death knights when there’s someone else who can do that for them.”

  They rowed in the dawn, until the sun shone over the diminishing canyon walls and Remy knew that whatever had come before, he was about to see the famed towers of Karga Kul. Paelias and Vokoun keeping lookout at the bow for snags and sandbars. After some time Remy said, “Philomen sent them, didn’t he?”

  “Yes,” Biri-Daar said. She was trailing a hand in the water to soothe the burns from Gouvou’s flame.

  “He spoke of Orcus. Was that bravado, or true?”

  “True. Orcus puts his touch on all of the death knights. And every lich as well. The Road-builder and his retinue were given over to the Demon Prince as well. I fear,” Biri-Daar said quietly, as if she meant only Remy to
hear, “that we have not seen the last of his actions yet.”

  “Philomen is the Demon Prince’s man.”

  It was not a question exactly, and when Biri-Daar answered she was expanding on what Remy said. “If you can call him a man,” she said. “He may have become something else.”

  In the few minutes of their conversing, the canyon walls had grown lower. “It is one year, almost to the day, since I have seen Karga Kul,” Biri-Daar said. “These riverbanks lower, and the city grows closer. At the moment when the left bank begins to rise, and the right bank grows still flatter-that is the moment when you may look to the horizon and see the towers of Karga Kul. From there they look as if they hang over the waters of the river; but that is only an illusion. As you draw closer, you see first that they are on the left bank, and then, as you come farther down the river, they disappear for miles. Only in the last few bends, as you near the landing below the bluffs, do the towers reappear again. It is a trick of perspective, of the rise and fall of mountains. But it breeds stories.”

  This was the longest Remy had ever heard Biri-Daar talk. She was coming home, coming to the end of her quest. And she was bringing him, with his demon-tainted chisel and his uncertain history… I have much to atone for, Remy thought. If not in the true situation of things, then certainly in the eyes of those who have endangered their lives to save mine.

  Yet he was not the only one on the boat with something to prove, something to atone for, something to settle and make right. Biri-Daar had her own ghosts. “What did Gouvou mean about legacy?” Remy asked.

  As soon as he had said it, Remy realized that it had come across as a match thrown into a hayloft. He lifted a hand and started to add something else, but he never got the chance. “Oh, I think he was clear about that,” came Lucan’s voice. Everyone looked around in surprise that the elf had survived the night and awoken coherent-save Keverel, who shocked Remy by shooting him a look of pure anger. Remy hadn’t seen the cleric that furious in any of their encounters with the minions of Orcus. “I just meant,” Remy began, but he didn’t get to finish.

  “Yes, he was,” Biri-Daar said, picking up from where Lucan had left off. Looking at the contours of scale and color on her face, Remy realized that he had learned to read the expressions of dragonborn on this journey-one more thing he had never expected to know, or thought could be known, or thought about at all. “He did not tell us anything that we did not know already. Since the battle at Iban Ja’s bridge, Bahamut and Tiamat have been at war for the souls of the Order of the Knights of Kul. Ever since, in each generation, some of the Knights of Kul have been corrupted. And we no longer know who to trust.”

  Vokoun’s boat beached with a crunch of sand against its keel and a last rush of water swirling around its bow. They looked across the river, where the main docks of the city bustled with larger ships in from the Gulf. Caravans of mules and camels carried cargoes up the switchbacking road that led to the city’s main gate, far above and out of sight. Other merchants, willing to pay the outrageous fees to avoid that road, loaded their wares straight into a cave. “From there,” Biri-Daar explained, “everything goes up, carried by tamed beasts. Those were once caves. Now they have been carved and worked into a dozen levels of basements and dungeons.”

  “The Seal is in there?” Remy asked. “Seems too easy to get to.”

  “You wouldn’t say that if you’d seen what’s inside,” Obek said.

  “The militias of Karga Kul make very sure that nothing goes in through that cave except what has been bought, paid for, taxed, approved, licensed, and inspected,” Paelias said. “Or so I am told. A cousin of mine is a merchant of Feywild herbs. He rages entertainingly about the rules of this city and the Mage Trust.”

  “And there are magical entrapments throughout,” Obek added. “Any invader will find the first caves coming down on his head the minute the Mage Trust snaps its fingers.”

  What a spectacle it was, Remy thought. The Whitefall, running slow and nearly a mile wide, pouring into the waters of the Gulf to their right. To their left, the canyons that channeled it, all the way upstream beyond the landing and up into the high lakes country where Vokoun and his people came from. Across the river, the zigzag road on the face of the cliffs, rearing high above the water.

  And above it all, the towers of Karga Kul.

  BOOK VI

  KARGA KUL

  They came to the front gate via the switchbacking road, which they climbed on foot, sandwiched between a brace of donkeys and a long string of angry camels. It was late in the afternoon before they reached the top of the canyon.

  Flanked by forbidding watchtowers, the main gate of Karga Kul stood open. At the foot of its walls sprouted a semipermanent shantytown of itinerant merchants, tinkers, actors, and supplicants to the Mage Trust or one of the city’s other authorities. “The unlucky ones who can’t gain entry,” Keverel said to Remy. “This is why Obek needed to come in with us.” As they approached, some of the shanty dwellers came toward them bearing promises of fabulous wealth, forbidden pleasures, occult knowledge… they focused on Biri-Daar, recognizing her as one of the Knights of Kul.

  “Noble paladin! I have lost my letter from the Emperor of Saak-Opole and the Mage Trust will not see me unless I am sponsored!”

  Biri-Daar reached out a gauntleted hand to fend off the shouting, gray-headed madman. “There is no emperor in Saak-Opole, is there?” she asked Obek.

  He chuckled. “Not these last five hundred years.”

  Closer to the gate, traffic was divided into commercial goods and individual entries. Biri-Daar held the blazon of the Knights of Kul high in the air and a functionary at the gate saw it. He waved them forward. “Number in your party.”

  “Six.”

  The functionary counted. “Number of the six who are citizens of Karga Kul.”

  “Two.” Biri-Daar pointed at Keverel and then herself.

  “Errand.”

  “A report from Biri-Daar of the Knights of Kul to the Mage Trust.”

  The functionary looked up at her. He was a stout and soft man, accustomed to a life of quill pens and couches. His sense of professional ethics, Remy could see, was nagging at him. Doubtless he was not supposed to let just anyone in to see the Mage Trust. But, he was likely reasoning, even if he did let them in and they went to the trust, there were further and more formidable barriers. That was the excuse he needed.

  “Biri-Daar of the Knights of Kul, you and your friends are welcome here,” the functionary said without a hint of warmth. He wrote on a sheet of heavy paper and handed the paper to Biri-Daar. “As I’m sure you are aware, your entry paper must be with you at all times during your stay.”

  “Thank you,” Biri-Daar said, matching the functionary’s tone. Then they were through the gate, the functionary already saying again behind them, “Number in your party…”

  The first thing Remy noticed about Karga Kul was that it was clean. He had seen cleanliness before, in his mother’s house and in sections of street and square in Avankil. There, money bought cleanliness and the threat of violence kept it. Here, in Karga Kul, he watched tradesmen pack up their storefront tables at the end of the day and pick up every last scrap of leather or wrapping canvas, every gnawed chicken bone or apple core that the day’s business had deposited in front of them. He had never seen anything like it, and the question that he had eventually found its way to his mouth.

  “Obek,” he said. “Who do they fear?”

  All of them were waiting while Biri-Daar conversed with the secretaries of the Mage Trust. They sat at long benches on a covered patio at one corner of the trust’s offices, where the trustees spent their days hearing the complaints of the citizenry and their nights delving into the avenues of magical research-thaumaturgical, necromantic, wizardly, or elemental-that best pleased and piqued their natures.

  Obek shrugged. “There are militias that enforce the will of the Mage Trust. One thing the Mage Trust wills is that Karga Kul be clean. I like it.”r />
  “What happens if someone doesn’t clean up?”

  “Try it and find out,” Obek said. He walked over to a merchant packing jerked meats back into rolls of canvas and bought a fistful of long strips. Handing one to Remy when he came back, Obek watched the conversation between Biri-Daar and the trust’s official. “Wonder if they’re talking about me,” he said.

  “I would guess they’re a little more worried about the fate of the city and the seal,” Remy said.

  Obek chuckled. “Think you? Perhaps. But I am known in this city, and there are those who despise me.”

  “You mentioned that when we met.”

  “Did I mention that I killed one of the trustees?” Obek countered. He watched Remy’s face with a toothy grin on his own. “I didn’t, did I? Well. We all have our secrets.” He bit into the jerky and chewed. “Fear not, Remy of Avankil,” he said around the bite. “The trustee in question deserved it. And so does his successor, although I fear Biri-Daar would disagree. A word of advice. Do not put the chisel in anyone’s hands. When the time comes to destroy it, make sure you do it yourself.” Obek bit off another mouthful of jerky. “I’ll be there to make sure you make sure. Not because I don’t trust you, mind; just because it’s the kind of thing that cannot be allowed to go wrong.”

  “How did you just happen to find us?” Remy asked.

  Obek nodded thoughtfully as he chewed. “Nothing just happens,” he said, and might have said more, but Biri-Daar was coming over to gather the group back together.

  “The trust will meet with us,” she said. “But there is no guarantee that they will believe what we have to say.”

  “Why not?” Remy asked. “They sent you, didn’t they?”