by Alex Irvine
Keverel spoke to both of them. “Uliana, you reason with a man who is beyond reason and no longer a man. Philomen, you command this rabble as though you were a hierophant, one of the death priests of Orcus. Surely one so powerful as a hierophant may simply do away with us and go about his business of flooding our world with demonic savagery.”
“Wait,” Remy said. “Philomen. Why do I need to give you the chisel?”
Philomen’s eyes narrowed. “You stand on a very thin edge, Remy. A word from me and you go into Thanatos. Mortals do not return from thence.”
Remy brandished the chisel. “This is what you want,” he said.
“Remy, you mustn’t,” Uliana said. Biri-Daar reached out to him; Remy flinched away.
He faced down the vizier. “Philomen, mortals do not return from Thanatos. Do chisels?”
In Philomen’s face, Remy saw that he was right. “You want the chisel for yourself. If it goes into the Abyss, you’ll never see it again.”
Philomen drew himself up. “Boy. This bravado of yours will fade quickly when you find yourself looking into the face of Orcus.”
The sneering Remy could have stood. The threats were nothing new. But after what he had done during the past weeks, after the betrayal and the bravery, the horrors and the magnificence of the comrades in whose company he had fought his way across the Dragondown… he was not a boy, and would not be called one.
“Boy?” he repeated.
Pivoting, he drove the chisel like a knife through the slack face of the nearest demon. Its skull burst like a rotten fruit and it dropped without a sound. “Boy?” Remy said again. He kicked the demon, rolling it over. “I am no boy to lead by the nose and leave in the wastes to die. Not anymore.”
Another kick sent the demon, and the chisel protruding from its head, over the edge of the portal slab and into the midnight fires of Thanatos.
Philomen said nothing aloud, but Remy’s mind lit afire with necrotic agony as the demon-beholden vizier, once a man and now a death priest hierophant, smote him to his knees. The invading demons sprang back into action and from deep inside the agonized reaches of his brain, Remy heard the sounds of desperate battle. He looked up into the looming maw of a hezrou, the size of a troll-and three arrows, one after another, thwocked into the side of its head. Galvanized, Remy sprang back from its fall, which shook the portal slab. His sword was in his hand and a battle surged around him, tilting and swaying the slab as the combatants ebbed and flowed across its invisible axis.
A flash, gone in an eyeblink but brighter than the sun for the moment of its existence, closed Remy’s eyes. He turned to see what had happened; the talons of a hopping vrock raked down his back; he swung blindly, felt the blade of his sword grate along bone, and saw that Uliana had unleashed some force…
She had brought down the lightning. A thousand feet underground, Uliana had brought down the lightning. Demons lay blackened and unmoving all around. It was, Remy saw, as if the spell she had invoked to protect him from the evistro was a bee sting. Even Philomen staggered-and staggered again as Paelias began to work his fey magic, weaving a thicket of living thorns around the hierophant’s legs. It grew; Philomen killed it with a necrotic touch; it began to grow again. Obek leaped out onto the portal slab, bringing it for a moment nearly level. A plan presented itself to Remy. It depended on a great many things going right-in other words, on luck… “Paelias!” he cried. “It’s luck we need!”
“And luck you shall have!” the star elf cried in return, the silvery and lethal charms of the fey flicking from him like raindrops to dazzle and weaken the demonic foes. Turning his attention back to Philomen, Paelias called out a charm in the liquid Elvish of the eladrin-Lucan, his bowstring broken, and rushed across to join the melee, snapped his head around, eyes widening at the audacity of his eladrin cousin-and Remy felt a reckless flood of certainty.
Yes. It was daring. It was bold. It would work. Paelias had stolen the hierophant’s luck. It was the great trick of the fey warlocks, dangerous and fickle. There was no telling how long it would last.
Philomen turned to the star elf. “O fey,” he chided. “You would have my luck? We are far past the time when luck could save you.”
Seething necrotic energy arced out from Philomen’s staff and struck Paelias down, the tatters of the eladrin’s fey aura swirling away into the darkness. Keverel fought back, his mace crunching into the vizier’s back, but it was too late. With a wail Paelias covered his face with his hands and pitched over on his side, his legs scissoring along the floor. A hulking goristro demon fell upon him, heedless of Lucan’s arrows-and Remy was too far away.
Paelias had known luck would not save him, Remy thought. That is why he handed it off to me. The footloose eladrin, unwelcome among his own, had died saving the lives of strangers.
Remy charged toward Philomen, the agony of betrayal too much to bear-but luck intervened. A vrock scrabbling through the opening between worlds caught the hem of Remy’s tunic in its beak. He lost his balance on the angled surface of the portal slab, and fell. The vrock raised a talon; he parried it; the vrock let go his tunic and bit into Remy’s shoulder, the hooked tip of its beak punching through armor and muscle straight to the bone. With the hilt of his sword he hammered at the side of its head, again and again, breaking its beak and then shattering its skull. It fell limp and he kicked it back through the gap whence it had come.
“The seal, Remy!” Biri-Daar called. “Now!”
Remy ran to help. Reaching the corner of the seal nearest him, he dropped his sword and found purchase for his hands in the grooves of the deeply cut runes. The magic pouring from them tingled in his fingertips; the wound in his shoulder pained him less, although still terribly. With every pull on the seal, the muscle in his shoulder tore a little more.
The floor of the chamber was polished to a fine gloss, and the seal too was smoothed by the attentions of long-dead artisans. It moved much more easily than a stone of its weight should have… until it hit the raised lip at the edge of the tilted portal slab. “Lift,” Remy said through gritted teeth-not to Biri-Daar, stronger than he was, but to his shoulder, which screamed out in his head as he bent his legs and strained upward with everything he had. The seal came up off the ground.
Around them the battle surged, Lucan and Keverel and Uliana and the recovered Knights of Kul arrayed against a host of demons that grew with every moment. Uliana’s greatness, Remy realized, would never be known. She brushed aside the demons like flies, destroying them with a thought. Only Philomen was a worthy opponent for her.
And she was slowly, surely, getting the better of him as well. He could draw on the strength of Thanatos, on the awful power of the Demon Prince of the Undeath-but she drew on the power of the very stones from which the city of Karga Kul had been hewn, the unknown thousands of years that men had struggled to keep the demonic hordes from overrunning the mortal plane. All of that-all of what made Karga Kul, Karga Kul-was with her. Philomen struck at her with necrotic horrors, visions of the damned; she struck back with the elemental rage of mountain and sky. Keverel, the holy man of Erathis, fought with her, the strokes of his mace and strength of his faith slowly taking their toll. In Uliana’s remaining eye shone the grim and somehow ecstatic determination of the warrior who knows that she will not survive the day, but knows too that a more important enemy will die with her.
The Knights of Kul killed and killed, also knowing that they were to die. So brave, Remy thought, seeing one of them at last overrun by a swarm of evistros, killing them even as they tore the life from his body. Let me be worthy of that bravery and that sacrifice. And Paelias’s sacrifice of luck.
It was a prayer of sorts, and whether any god heard it-Pelor or Corellon or Erathis or any other-the act itself restored Remy’s resolve and strength. With Biri-Daar on the corner of the seal nearest him, Remy braced his feet on the other side of the raised lip of the portal slab, hauling the seal out over it as Obek pushed from behind and the Knights of Kul gave th
eir lives for their city and the honor of their order. But still the slab and the seal did not meet flush, and the sigils began to flicker. The magic, given its potency by fleshly sacrifice, faded just as fleshly life did-only much faster. “To me, Knights!” Biri-Daar called out, and the four remaining Knights of Kul leaped to her, seeing at once what needed to be done.
They came down on the edge of the slab, forcing it down level with the floor-and the luck fled. Fleeing vrock demons, seeing their last chance, dropped from the darkness above, their sudden weight enough to pitch the slab over to an opposite angle. The seal hung out over the gap created by the tilt. Biri-Daar was left dangling at the end of the Seal, and Remy scrambled back from the sudden appearance of the endless, despairing waste of Thanatos spread out below him. The vrocks scrambled through the gap and were gone… all except one.
It craned its vulture’s neck and bit down on Biri-Daar’s leg. She growled and kicked at it with her other leg. It flapped its great wings and tugged, adding its two claws to the grip on her leg.
The seal began to overbalance and slid, grinding along the edge of the hole between the mortal plane and the infernal Thanatos.
Remy saw it all happening before it happened. Biri-Daar looked up at the seal as she felt it shift. She looked down at the vrock. She looked up into the darkness, toward the towers of Karga Kul that whitely reflected sunlight far above in a world that-Remy realized as Biri-Daar looked back down, and over, and directly at him-she would never see again.
She let go at the vrock’s next tug, and was gone through the infernal gap. Remy cried out, wordless and anguished, lunging for her-but she swung a powerful arm and knocked him away, his extended hand just brushing and tugging at her breastplate and down the length of the arm that shoved him back. Biri-Daar fell, eyes open, sword out, killing the vrock even as its companions swooped up from the black crags and Remy lost sight of her, the world lost sight of her. He scrambled back toward the center of the portal slab, still screaming even as he felt the slab’s inexorable swing, and it closed against the Seal with a boom that rolled up into the invisible heights of the chamber and out into the ends of the hall, far above in the quiet space of the council chamber of the decimated Mage Trust.
Uliana died knowing that the Seal was restored. Paelias, bluish pallor seeping into the skin around his mouth, lay dead near the figure of Philomen, who was on hands and knees.
Remy approached the vizier. There was something in his left hand. He looked at it and put it in the pouch where for the last weeks he had carried the chisel. Then he looked down at the drawn, corrupt face of his former mentor. This, he thought, is the man who got me out of Avankil. For that, despite everything else, I owe him a debt.
“Would the monks at the Monastery of the Cliffs have killed me?” he asked. “If I had lived to reach them? Or would they have taken me to the Road-builder themselves? How did you imagine me dying, Philomen?”
“You did not have all the luck,” Philomen said. “Boy.”
Wordlessly Remy ran him through, leaving his sword where it stood at an angle out from the ribs of the desiccated corpse of the man who had given Remy his first job. But that was when he had still been a boy. He looked around. “Lucan,” he said.
The elf was kicking over the corpses of demons and killing whichever of them stirred. “Remy.”
“Where’s Obek?”
“Here,” came the tiefling’s voice from the other side of the Seal. “Who do you think kept pushing when you were out on the carousel there?” Obek came into view-their light was much diminished, and Remy could barely see him until Keverel, his voice hoarse with exhaustion, invoked the name of his god one last time, the word Erathis spreading through the chamber, bringing light to the shadows.
“Philomen,” Keverel mused. “Vizier of Avankil.” He walked to the vizier’s body, rolled the staff along the floor with his foot, prodded the many sashes and pouches of the vizier’s robe. “It is a very dark day. Biri-Daar was the greatest of the Knights of Kul. Her memory may yet restore the order to the greatness that is its rightful legacy.” The cleric’s gaze roved over the carnage in the Chamber of the Seal, and came to rest on the Seal itself. “This is now the tomb of Biri-Daar,” he said. “Though few will ever see it.” He made a gesture of blessing over the seal, and it seemed incongruous to Remy, who had seen what lay beneath the floor.
Keverel saw him looking, and must have read the expression on Remy’s face. “Blessings are not for those places that are already holy,” he said. “Surely you have learned this now.”
“Learning,” Obek said. “I am sick of learning. Let us go away from this place to somewhere else, a place where there is nothing to learn.”
The four of them were coming closer to each other, not intending it so but under the power of an impulse to draw together, the four survivors of a journey long and treacherous. “You did well, tiefling,” Lucan said.
“Oh, praise from the elf,” Obek said. He looked at the Seal and at the body of Paelias. “None of us did well enough.”
“But we did,” Keverel said. “Karga Kul stands, and will stand. That, at least, we have done.”
They were quiet for a long while after that, in the glow of Erathis that silvered the bodies of the living and the dead.
BOOK VII
NEXT
The sun on the Dragondown Gulf did as much as anything could to dispel the memories of what had happened inside the cliff. Remy looked up from Cliff Quay. “It’s time to leave this place for a while. There will be unrest in the absence of power,” he said. “The Mage Trust is dead. The seal is restored. Enemies remain. Our victory is partial.”
On Remy’s other side, Obek and Lucan leaned against the railing of a pier, looking not up at the city but down at the ship they were about to board. They were paying in gold for their passage south to the Cape of Toradan, where the city of that name still stood looking out over the waters of the Dragondown Gulf. Remy considered that he had seen two of the Five Cities. Toradan would be the third, Toradan whose native sailor sang to raise a wind to bring them home more quickly: Spires of Toradan, spires of Toradan Let the golden fires of the sun On your rooftops guide me home
Remy regarded the gold-filigreed fragment of eggshell in his palm. He had it from a paladin of Bahamut, one of the great leaders of the Order of the Knights of Kul. He shook out the chain and looked at the broken links. Any jeweler in Toradan would be able to repair it. The boat rocked and groaned in rhythm with the swells on the outer Cape Kul, and Remy turned his mind forward, to Toradan. Avankil would no longer be safe for him. Like Biri-Daar, perhaps, he was growing into a citizen of the Dragondown; all of this land’s mystery, wonder, and danger were his to explore.
Philomen’s agents survived-in Avankil, and Toradan, and in the Monastery of the Cliff. The threats that lay below and behind the visible world were still dangerous. But where there were threats, there was adventure. And glory.
And, of course, the treasures of lost civilizations whose remains were everywhere… if one knew how to look. Remy saw Obek and Lucan gambling with another pair of passengers, and Keverel looking out over the bow into the limitless reaches of the gulf beyond the harbors. These three, and four more who had died along the way, had begun to teach Remy to see.
The world would yet teach him more.
The coffers of Karga Kul had produced a handsome price in gemstones for the staff of Philomen. The vizier’s other treasures included a ring Remy wore on his right hand index finger. Lucan said it was a ring that brought luck. Remy thought that he had seen how luck operated in the last moments of Paelias’s life, and wasn’t sure he wanted more luck around. He’d always survived with the luck he’d been born with.
But the ring was his, and in the pouch where he had carried the chisel, next to Biri-Daar’s gilded eggshell, Remy carried a drawstring bag filled with more money than he had ever seen in one place in his life. His first impulse when Lucan had given him his share had been to give it back, to say that the liv
es of his comrades were not worth gems and gold.
Lucan had seen the argument brewing in Remy’s eyes. “Remy,” he’d said. “It never was a trade. You don’t get to choose one or the other.”
And Remy had taken the treasure. Kithri, Iriani, Paelias, Biri-Daar… I only knew them a few days, or weeks, Remy thought. Yet they will be more alive to me in my memory than anyone I knew in Avankil. This was what destiny felt like, he decided. When everything around you-every sensation and experience and memory and expection-when all of it was more real than anything you’d ever felt, that was destiny. That was how you knew you were walking the path your life had laid out for you.
Remy would walk the path. He jingled the pouch. He would learn to experience sadness and the thrill of victory at the same time. Over his head, the sailors sang, and the ship turned south away from the Quay of the Cliff, heading for open water and the towers of Toradan.
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