The seal of Karga Kul

BOOK VI

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.”

“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?”

“They never expected us to succeed. And if I tell the truth, my story will make me look like a liar,” Biri-Daar said.

Lucan, Paelias, and Keverel were just coming over to rejoin the group from a brief trip through the last dying corners of the day’s market. “Liar?” Lucan said. “Has Remy been telling stories of Sigil again?”

“Much is at stake here,” Biri-Daar said. “If the Mage Trust is not on our side, we are going to have to fight all the way to the Seal, and fight to inscribe it anew. How much time do we have before the Road-builder returns?” She looked to Keverel with this last question.

He was shaking his head. “There is no way to know. Lich magic is unpredictable. He may not return for days; or he may return before I finish speaking. But we must destroy the quill as soon as we can.”

“Then let us get on with the conversation,” Biri-Daar said, and led them into the Palace of the Mage Trust.

The civilization that founded the city that became Karga Kul was known only by its obsessive repetition of the numbers six and seven, always together. In the Palace, that repetition took several forms. There were six floors and seven rooms on each. The stairs between each floor numbered thirteen. The Palace itself was hexagonal in shape, with seven windows on each side of the hexagon, and so on. Guards conveyed them down a hall paved with hexagonal stones. As they walked, Remy counted, and sure enough, the hall was seven stones wide.

He wasn’t sure what to think about Obek’s revelations. It was certain that the tiefling’s presence would be a problem for the trust-unless he had been truthful in his assertion that the trustee had deserved death, and the surviving trustees agreed with his perspective. Remy found this unlikely. Was it possible that Obek had already informed Biri-Daar of this? Remy couldn’t decide. It was the kind of secret that, once revealed, might endanger the success of their quest, and for that, Remy knew, Biri-Daar would not hesitate to kill. On the other hand, the Mage Trust of Karga Kul was notoriously capricious; it was possible that a little fear might make them a little more tractable.

Not for the first time, Remy was glad that he did not share the responsibilities of leadership. He was free to act but no other lives depended on his choices.

Obek, walking in front of him, looked over his shoulder at Remy. It was strange to see a tiefling wink in a conspiratorial way, as if in getting to know Obek, Remy had somehow become tinged with the infernal himself. It made him nervous-but Obek had fought bravely since forcing his way into the group in the sewers of the Inverted Keep. Remy found that he trusted the tiefling, and could find no reason not to.

He winked back and they went on through the jumble of sixes and sevens until they came to the double hexagonal doors of the Council Chamber of the Mage Trust.

The council chamber was built in the shape of a six-pointed star, each arm of which was a small gallery of long-dead members of the trust. Around a seven-sided table in the center of the chamber were six chairs, and in those six chairs were the members of the trust. A seventh chair sat empty. The guards conducted the adventurers into the chamber and remained near the door.

Remy looked from member to member of the trust, seeing age and wisdom and fear… except on one face, a woman no older than his mother. Either she was a prodigy, or something had recently changed in the trust. It was impossible to think that someone so young had grown powerful enough in magical ability to warrant election to such a position. “This is Shikiloa,” another trustee said, introducing her and then the rest of the trustees in turn, herself last. Her name was Uliana. Remy didn’t remember the other names and the other trustees took no notice of him. All eyes were on Biri-Daar primarily, with leery glances reserved for Obek, who hung behind the group near the door. Remy wasn’t sure whether the trustees were nervous about Obek himself or about tieflings in general, but whichever was the case, they surely did look discomfited by his presence. He faded back away from the table to stand next to Obek. “Don’t worry,” he whispered, moving his lips as little as possible. “I will speak for you even if no one else will.”

“Biri-Daar of the Order of the Knights of Kul,” Uliana said. She was one of the oldest of the Mage Trust and the longest-serving. “This trust sent you forth on a grave errand. Have you returned bearing good tidings or bad?”

“Both,” Biri-Daar said.

“Which outweighs the other?”

“That yet depends on our actions,” Biri-Daar said. “And on yours. We have recovered Moidan’s Quill that inscribed the original Seal of Karga Kul.”

“The quill your fellow knight stole,” one of the trustees whose name Remy had forgotten said. He was a fat and red-bearded man with quick intelligence in his eyes and a goblet of wine in one hand.

“True, and disturbing,” Shikiloa said. “You will pardon the directness of my speech; I fear that the desperation of the situation calls for a simplification of this body’s normal rules about age and order of speech.”

“You would feel that way, of course,” Uliana said. “Arguments of protocol are a waste of time with the seal so thin.”

“There is another problem,” Biri-Daar said.

“Which is…?” the red-beared drunkard prompted.

“Philomen, the vizier of Avankil, is in league with the Demon Prince Orcus,” Biri-Daar stated.

There was a long moment of shocked silence. “How can this be?” Shikiloa said. “Avankil has been our staunchest ally, even when Toradan and Saak-Opole turned against us.”

Biri-Daar pointed at Remy. “This is Remy, also of Avankil,” she said. Then she looked at Remy and he knew he was expected to speak.

He took a few steps forward, to stand next to the empty seventh chair. He and Biri-Daar flanked it, with Lucan, Paelias, Keverel, and Obek in a gently curved rank behind them. “Since I was a boy,” he began, “I have been a courier for Philomen. I do not know how it started. But he had always been good to me. A few…”

Remy faltered, realizing he had no clear idea of how long it had been since he left Avankil. “The last thing he asked of me was that I take something to Toradan for him,” he went on. “And I could not know what it was. I was attacked on the road to Toradan by stormclaw scorpions. They killed my horse. I would have died too, in the wastes there, if Biri-Daar had not stopped and Keverel had not healed me. I have been traveling and fighting with them ever since.”

“So you have betrayed your errand for Philomen?” Shikiloa asked.

“His errand betrayed me,” Remy said. “He sent me with this, and knew that it would draw the kind of attention that gets messengers killed.”

Holding the chisel’s box carefully in both hands, Remy angled it so each member of the trust in turn could see the sigils carved into its lid and along the front near the latch. They recognized the enchantments, he could see; their eyes widened, and even the red-bearded trustee set his goblet down and made a sign. “What is in it?” Uliana asked. “We have no time for roundabout stories, and less for theatrics.”

“A chisel,” Remy said, and opened the lid.

“Designed by someone closely tied to Orcus,” Keverel added. “Designed, I fear, to destroy the seal.”

“Ridiculous,” Shikiloa said. “Philomen is a scholar of languages, a peddler of petty court schemes, a bestower of favors upon women of little virtue. He has traveled thrice to Karga Kul in the last ten years. All of us have met him, and none has ever sensed anything ill about his demeanor. Yet you have this that you call proof?”

“There is more,” Biri-Daar said. “Much more. Yet as Uliana says, we have no time. For our news is not yet fully given. Moidan’s Quill,” she went on, producing it from inside her armor, “is more than what it seems. Uliana. Note the symbols, carved so delicately into the barrel near the point. Do you recognize them?”

The trustee paled, her skin fading to nearly the off-white color of her hair. “A phylactery,” she said. “It has been made into a phylactery.”

“It was always a phylactery,” Keverel corrected. “Was not the seal laid down at about the time the Road-builder disappeared and the Inverted Keep tore free into the sky?”

The Mage Trust was silent.

“We killed the Road-builder,” Biri-Daar said. “But as long as the quill is intact, he will return. We must act immediately.”

“Immediately? We must act decisively, yes, but not rashly,” Shikiloa said.

“Begging your pardon, Excellency, but if the Road-builder returns you will find a brief hesitation to have been extremely rash,” Lucan said as he stepped forward.

Redbeard raised his goblet. “So we have a quill containing a lich king, a chisel imbued with demonic powers, a secret enemy in control of Avankil, and an Abyssal horde about to break through the seal. There. The situation is described. Now let us address it.”

Suddenly Remy liked him.

“Quite,” Uliana said. “The seal is weakened almost to transparency. I fear it is too thin to reinscribe.”

Redbeard set down his goblet. “Then-”

“Then we must inscribe a new one and destroy the old as we lay the new one in its place.” Uliana looked at everyone in the room, each in turn. “Then we must destroy quill and chisel both, and before the return of the Road-builder. Guard!” she called.

The senior guard inside the door stepped forward.

“Close the gates to the city,” Uliana commanded. “Both at the road and at Cliff Quay. No one shall enter or leave Karga Kul until the seal is replenished and our citizens and traders may safely go about their business again.” The guard left and Uliana turned to Biri-Daar. “You have an unexpected comrade in your group,” she said. “And I do not mean the boy from Avankil.”

“I’m not a boy,” Remy said.

“Ah, but you are,” Redbeard said, “because you do not know when to keep your mouth shut.” He gave Remy a salute with the now-empty goblet.

Shikiloa rose and paced. “As the successor to Vurinil, Mage Trustee of Karga Kul-”

“Daughter, I believe, is the word,” Obek said.

She glared at him, a flush rising across the planes of her face. Remy had seen that look on faces before killing. “-Vurinil, who was killed by the tiefling Obek, may I speak?” she asked Uliana-a little too sweetly, it seemed to Remy.

“Certainly,” Uliana said.

“Obek will certainly say that my predecessor was a usurper, and a betrayer of the trust between this city and the trustees. He may be right about this. It is also true, however,” Shikiloa said, “that since his murder of Vurinil-my father Vurinil, a noble servant of the trust and of Karga Kul-the seal has rapidly deteriorated, there have been sightings of demons in the streets and in the lower portions of the underground keeps. Now Obek comes back, in the company of Biri-Daar, herself a member of the same guild that stole the quill! And with them comes yet another stranger, this Remy, bearing a demonic instrument for the destruction of the seal! Fellow trustees, it seems that we have not helped ourselves by entrusting our lives and the life of Karga Kul to these… adventurers.”

“Yet what strange deceivers they be,” Redbeard observed dryly. “Coming right to the front door and presenting themselves to us.”

With a shock, Remy realized that the other three members of the trust, the ones who had not yet spoken in the debate, were asleep. Could this be the feared Mage Trust of Karga Kul, he thought-the trust that strikes such fear into its citizens that they pick up orange peels from the street?

“You are drunk,” Shikiloa said. “As is your custom. Well, it is my custom to suspect the motives of those who preach unseen danger, when they might well simply be aggrandizing themselves. You, tiefling. Murderer. You risked your life entering this room, did you not?”

Obek nodded. “I did.”

“If we kill you now, will your risk have been worth it?”

“Erathis is the god of this city, and I am an adopted citizen of Karga Kul,” Obek said, standing erect and fearless, not looking over his shoulder at the guards who awaited Shikiloa’s command to strike him down. “I returned to fight for this city, and as far as I pledge myself to any god, it is to Erathis.”

“And I’m sure he is glad of your devotion. It’s Erathis we need, and Bahamut too, and perhaps the Lady of Pain thrown into the bargain, if the Knights of Kul are to do us any good,” said Shikiloa. “I expect neither the gods nor the dragonborn to offer us any assistance we might wish to accept.”

A pained expression crossed Biri-Daar’s face at this mention of the Knights. “When the Knights of Kul are needed, they will rise to that need,” she said.

“That is my hope as well.” Uliana turned to the window.

Shikiloa smiled. “Will you go and ask them yourself? Perhaps you could bring them news of Moula and the quill as well.”

“If that is your wish, I am willing,” Biri-Daar said, in a tone of voice that indicated she was willing only, and just barely at that.

“Do not,” Uliana said. “Not yet. Instead let us see what the minions of Orcus are planning. I do not believe the Road-builder’s return is imminent. I would feel it. So we have a moment to gather knowledge, and perhaps even to use it wisely.” The last was directed at Shikiloa, in whose eyes burned something more than anger but just slightly less than hate.

She is afraid, Remy thought. He caught Biri-Daar’s eye, and Keverel’s, and saw that both of them thought the same thing. But of what?

The Black Mirror of the Trust was a circular pane of obsidian, polished and laid into a frame of burnished copper so that it could stand vertical or be laid flat. Each position lent itself to different methods of scrying. Uliana laid it flat. The rest of the Mage Trust spread around her and the mirror. Remy and the rest of Biri-Daar’s group mingled with them, Biri-Daar closest to Uliana and Obek on the opposite side. A visibly skeptical Shikiloa and an obviously drunk Redbeard were closest to Obek, where they could watch Uliana. From a chain around her neck she took a tiny crystal vial. Three drops of clear fluid fell from the unstoppered vial onto the polished obsidian. Whispering an incantation under her breath, Uliana moved her hand in a smoothing motion, a few inches over the obsidian. The drops spread into an invisible layer-and as they spread, an image emerged.

First came color: black warming through red to a fiery molten orange flecked with brilliant white. Then motion, the shapes of figures…

Remy saw Obek turn his head, ever so slightly. He followed the tiefling’s gaze and saw that Shikiloa was doing something with her hands. Looking back to the mirror, Remy watched the figures resolve. They were all shapes, all sizes, the nameless hordes of the Abyss under the control of their ruler Orcus. Orcus, the Demon Prince of the Undeath, sworn enemy of all things living. Goat-legged, dragon-tailed, with the horns of a ram and the fiery eyes of the greater undead. Bearer of the Wand of Orcus, with its skull of a dead god, Despot of Thanatos-his presence loomed over everything they saw.

“It is as I feared,” Uliana said. She spoke with her eyes closed, since to channel the vision into the mirror she could not see it herself-at least not with her eyes. “They are gathering. They know that the seal weakens. They know…”

Motion drew Remy’s attention away from the mirror and back to Shikiloa. He saw her hands move. She brought a hand to her face, kissed something she held between finger and thumb.

When she drew it away again, blood glistened on her lower lip.

Shikiloa extended her hand over the mirror. “Father,” she said, her voice low but clear in the nearly silent room. “As you bid me.”

As she opened her hand, Obek was reaching to catch the bright bloody sliver that fell from it. Redbeard, his eyes bulging from their sockets as he saw what she had done, flung out an arm and shoved her back away from the mirror, the action instinctive but futile as the sliver fell through Obek’s hand as if it was not there.

Obek clutched at his pierced palm, roaring with pain. Blood spurted from it as if it had been pierced by a spear rather than a sliver no thicker than a needle. Drops of that blood fell with the sliver onto the mirror’s surface. The color of the blood spread like a glaze across the scene of Orcus’s dominion. When it had covered the entire surface of the mirror, the entire surface flipped up to the vertical. Behind the bloody glaze, figures loomed closer. Something crashed into the finish.

“Traitor!” Obek roared, his bloody hand thrust out at Shikiloa. “Like your father.”

Another crash against the glaze left a crack exactly the size of the sliver that had fallen from Shikiloa’s hand. She met his gaze, cold and distant. “You are a traitor to all humanity. And your kin, the demons, are coming to claim you.”

“Fool,” growled Biri-Daar. Another crack appeared in the surface of the mirror. The Mage Trust, save Uliana, fell back toward the shadowed galleries in the points of the star-shaped room. “Who turned you against the trust?”

A chip of the mirror came loose and plinked on the hexagonal stones of the floor. Sound came from it: a profusion of roaring and screeching, the scraping of what sounded like claws on the other side of the mirror.

“No one turned me,” Shikiloa sneered. “I am my own creature. My choices are my own. The tiefling dies if the city has to die with him.”

“How did you know he would be here?” Remy asked.

From the look on her face, he knew the answer.

“Philomen,” he said.

She did not deny it. She raised a short staff, its head transforming before their eyes from a crescent moon to an iridescent green skull.

“No,” Uliana groaned. Her eyelids fluttered as she tried to open her eyes and get free of the vision. “No,” she said again-and then she reached out her left hand, pointed unerringly at Shikiloa, and incinerated the youngest trustee before Shikiloa could defend herself.

At that moment the mirror exploded in a hail of obsidian shards. They stung and sliced across the exposed skin of Remy’s face and hands, tearing also at the leather of his tunic and boots. He ducked away, hearing the fragments ricochet around the room. Already there were screams; the unprotected and unprepared trustees were badly cut and slashed.

The demons that came through the opened portal were about the size of dwarves, but a burnt red in color with cruel wide mouths and four-fingered hands ending in ragged black claws. They tumbled over one another coming through the mirror frame. Behind them, the fiery hellscape of Thanatos belched its miasma into the council chamber.

“Demons aren’t my kin,” Obek snarled, and cut two of them in half before their feet had found the floor.

Since leaving Avankil, Remy had seen many things he’d never seen before. Most of them he had no name for, but these he recognized. They were known as evistros, or carnage demons. Remy had heard stories of them rampaging in packs near places where Abyssal energies spilled into the mortal world. They existed only to destroy. And they were destroying now, tearing the Mage Trust to bits as the embattled trustees, few of whom had ever fought with anything other than words, found themselves overrun by the savage demons who clawed and bit and rent them without mercy. They died despite the best efforts of Biri-Daar and Remy and the rest, who cut down the evistros nearly as fast as they could pour through the violated mirror.

Of the Mage Trust, only Uliana fought with courage. Her first victim had been Shikiloa the traitor, but in the moments since she had cut a swath through the evistros as she fought to close the portal they had opened. With the mirror destroyed, she opened her eyes and began to lay waste to the enemies of the trust and her city.

“Eladrin!” she shouted above the infernal yowling evistros and the sounds of steel on demonic flesh and bone. “With me!”

The star elf vaulted clear of the melee, leaping to catch a wall sconce and swinging up to brace against a timber supporting the vaulted ceiling. Grimly and with absolute calm he began to destroy the evistros that approached Uliana. Remy too fell back to protect her, as did Obek from the other side. Keverel swatted a leaping demon out of the air as it cleared the portal. It scrambled on the ground, but before it could find its feet he broke its back and turned to the next, the name of his god repeated over and over again on his lips.

The second focus of the battle was Biri-Daar, who stood alone, her enchanted blade describing an arc of maiming and death around her. Lucan’s arrows whispered through the air to catch those evistros that got out of the portal past Keverel and Uliana. They were everywhere, in frenzied groups dismembering the dead and swarming over the living. Some, caught up in the bloodlust, turned on one another, splattering their black and sulfurous blood to mix with the spilled red of the Mage Trust.

Something tugged at Remy’s belt, pulling him off balance. He looked down and saw one of the demons, gnawing on his belt-and the pouch where he had carried the chisel across the long miles from Avankil. Remy flicked his knife out of his sleeve, the way he’d learned back home on the waterfront, and stabbed it through the eye. It lashed him across the face with one claw and kept digging for the chisel with the other. He twisted the blade, feeling the bones of its skull crack. Malignant light still shone in its remaining eye, but with the twist of the blade its arms and legs fell limp and it dropped away as a blinding flash brought tears to Remy’s eyes. When his vision cleared, he saw tumbled and blackened bodies of evistros all around, yet he was untouched save for the fading afterimage.

“Mind the chisel, Remy,” Uliana said. “If they get their hands on it, the seal is as good as destroyed.”

Looking down, Remy saw ragged claw marks scored into the leather of his belt and the pouch containing the chisel in its box. Then the evistros came again in another wave, and he lifted his sword to meet them. Over his head, Uliana’s magic swept and flared, the evistros falling back before it as slowly-slowly, and with the help of Paelias, whose fey magic was anathema to the carnage demons-she choked off the open portal. The evistros came through fewer and fewer at a time, Keverel and Lucan exacting a terrible toll at their emergence; then they came through one at a time, wriggling through a diminished hole too small to admit a full grown man; then, as Keverel caved in the snarling face of a last single demon, Uliana closed off the portal, severing the dying evistro at the waist.

Still there were dozens of them in the Council Chamber. Cut off from Thanatos, they knew they could expect no mercy-not that they knew anything of mercy in Orcus’s realm. Gathering into knots of three or four, they banded together and fought to the death. Lucan ended the fight with a final arrow through the gut of an evistro that had already taken a half-dozen blows from Obek’s sword.

Of the Mage Trust, Uliana alone survived. She bent to pick up a large sliver of the Black Mirror, slick with the commingled blood of the rest of the trust. “Karga Kul will never be the same,” she said quietly. “And things may yet become more desperate. Remy of Avankil.”

Remy took a step forward.

“Have you the chisel?”

“I have it,” Remy said. He remembered the stubby, grasping fingers of the evistro feeling along his belt, and shuddered at the thought of what might have happened.

“At least some of the evistros knew of it, and you may yet meet more adversaries who will. Yet you must keep it,” Uliana said. “You have brought it this far under terrible pressure and with commendable courage. Now you must keep it a little longer, for there is no one else who can be trusted to do it.”

“I would trust any of them to do it,” Remy protested, extending his arm to encompass his companions.

“Which speaks well of you. Yet you have brought it this far, and we do not know whether that is luck or strength. It would be foolish to risk a change now. You will keep it until the time comes to destroy it. Biri-Daar.”

Biri-Daar offered a shallow bow.

“You will select six Knights of Kul, the six whom you would most trust to uphold the precepts of the order. You will go with them to the guard at the Cliff Quay and you will give him this.” She wrote on a parchment and pressed it shut with her seal. “Quickly. Meet us in the Chamber of the Seal. You have the quill, yes? Make sure you keep it with you.”

Without a word, Biri-Daar took the letter and left, shards of obsidian crunching under her boots. Uliana was moving at the same time, but in the other direction. She passed her hand over a blackened iron lock bolted into the wall, which fell open. As it did, the outline of another door appeared. “We must go now,” she said. “It may already be too late.”

The door opened to a narrow passage that angled down. “There are few ways to the Chamber of the Seal,” Uliana said. “This, and one other from below that only the trust knows of. At least I believe that is so.”

Remy could easily touch both walls of the passage without extending his arms all the way. The stone was cold and smooth, the angle down into the interior of the cliff from which loomed the towers of Karga Kul consistent even as the passage doubled back on itself, zigzagging down and ever down. Remy touched the walls every so often, because it kept everything real. He had seen so much in the past weeks-how long had it been since he had left Avankil? He thought perhaps only a month-that he found it difficult at moments like these to believe in even the simple reality of stone.

They reached a landing, hexagonal in shape, with doors in each of the six walls. “You would not want to open the wrong door here,” Uliana said. She walked slowly in a counterclockwise circle, touching the center of each door as she passed it. After a complete circuit, she stopped at the door directly underneath the staircase. Before she touched it, the door opened, disappearing into the wall. As they passed over the threshold, Remy looked and could see no sign that the door had ever existed.

Down they went again. “We are at the deepest levels of the ancient chambers cut into the cliff,” Uliana said. “Soon we will be below the level of the sea. I have not been this way since my initiation into the Mage Trust. I hope I never come here again.”

Remy thought he could smell the sea, but all he could see was the immediate length of the passage in front of him. The floor glistened in the Erathian light sparkling from Keverel’s helm and the head of Uliana’s staff. When they came to a branch in the passage-the first they had encountered since going through the door-Uliana nodded toward it and said, “The knights, if they come, will come from there.”

“They will come,” Keverel said.

They passed the branch and Remy looked to see if he could detect any light from approaching dragonborn paladins. The branch was dark. “They will come,” he echoed, and they passed on.

The roof of the passage grew higher, and vaulted. “Now we are in an ancient level that existed long before Karga Kul was called Karga Kul. Archives in long-dead languages mention this place as myth. It is possible that the builders of the first of these labyrinths opened a portal to the Abyss intentionally.”

“Never a good idea,” Lucan said.

“Your sense of humor is inappropriate,” Uliana said.

Paelias winked at his elf cousin. “But appreciated,” he said softly.

Next they came to a massive stone door, polished to a gloss that shone in the near-darkness. It was built of fourteen panels, seven black and seven red. “The colors of our vanished forebears,” Uliana said. “Red for blood and war, black for ink and knowledge.”

“Blood and ink,” Keverel said. “Books and killing build cities.”

Lucan looked surprised. “Irreverent, holy man? That’s unlike you.”

“Proximity to the Abyss, perhaps, pollutes my demeanor,” Keverel said, gritting his teeth.

“Leave him alone,” Remy said.

Lucan looked to him, flashing a bit of the suspicion Remy had seen in him right after joining the group back at Crow Fork Market. Then he looked away. “All of us need to back down,” he said. Flicking an arrow from his quiver, he spun it through his fingers like a baton and slipped it back in, choosing his saber instead.

The rest of them dropped hands to hilts as Uliana worked an invisible charm that opened the fourteen-paneled door. It swung silently back, revealing a great chamber, its ceiling lost in darkness and its walls writhing with ancient relief sculptures. They entered, and for a moment looked on in astonishment. “A marvelous people they must have been,” Uliana whispered. “I mourn them though they have been dead for thousands of years. The world is impoverished by their absence.”

Remy listened to her, and wondered what it must be like to think so deeply about the past. The present was more than enough for him to handle. The sculptures on the walls were of great heroes, three times the height of a man, depicted in postures of combat against demonic enemies. “They built this place as a shrine and a warning,” Keverel said. “How long has the seal lasted?”

“How long since the Road-builder shed his mortal life and became a lich?” Uliana answered. “The records become partial, then fragmentary, then…” She gestured up at the sculptures. “Then they are gone. Perhaps someone, somewhere, knows. I fear, though, that the only beings who know the true history of the seal and the city that became Karga Kul are…”

She pointed to the center of the room, as the sound of the approaching knights echoed down the passage outside.

The portal between Karga Kul and the Abyss was a circular stone door, set into the floor and without visible hinge or spring. The seal itself was a rectangular stone the size of a coffin lid and perhaps two feet thick, laid over the narrow gap between portal and bedrock floor. Once it had been a mighty stone, carried in by six dragonborn Knights of Kul who held it down while the first of the Mage Trust carved the first characters in the first seal.

None of them had known that already the Road-builder had made Moidan’s Quill, with which Uliana stood ready to write, the seat and repository of his treacherous soul. At last, they would replenish the seal, destroy the quill, get permanently rid of the Road-builder, save Karga Kul, and restore the status of the Knights of Kul.

Or they would all die.

Six hand-picked knights held the replacement seal, which could not touch the portal until the old Seal was removed; doubling the seal would have the effect of canceling both. So there would be a moment when the portal, necessarily, was open. The gods alone knew-and perhaps not even they-what would come through during that time.

“Hold it so that it overlaps from the seal to the floor,” Uliana ordered. “Exactly as the other one.” She looked over at Biri-Daar, who stood at the head of the ceremonial guard carrying the new seal. “The last time this was done, it was the abbot of the Monastery of the Cliff who held the quill. Or so it is hinted in the oldest records we have yet found.”

“Those same monks are now corrupt,” Keverel said. “They are a canker on the city of Toradan. When this is done, they are our next task.”

“When,” Paelias said. “The certainty of the holy man.”

“Quiet, please. It is time to write.” Uliana held up the quill. Remy had noticed something odd about her voice and looking at her he realized what it was: she was quietly weeping as she spoke. Before he had more than the briefest moment to wonder why, she thrust the quill into her left eye.

A low, quivering noise escaped her but she remained perfectly still. Removing the quill from her eye, she bent over the new Seal and began to write.

Each sigil burned as she inscribed it, blood and fluid from Uliana’s sacrificed eye dripping from her chin but her hand never wavering from its task. The quill moved in broad sweeping curves across the seal. The Knights of Kul looked away from her as she approached each of them in turn, working letter by agonized letter through the inscription that would reseal the portal to Thanatos. And as she wrote, the quill began to burn. Remy’s pulse quickened. If it burned away before she finished, would the Seal hold back the hordes of Orcus?

And would…?

Shadows began to form and pool in one corner of the room, farthest from the door. Biri-Daar saw Remy looking. She turned her head and saw exactly what Remy saw. She took a step around the edge of the portal to position herself between Uliana and the gathering shadows. They ballooned, piled on each other and grew up along the wall. Remy thought he saw a humanoid shape emerging.

Uliana, the flaming quill in her hand, added the last characters. The shadows on the wall had acquired a human silhouette. “Quickly,” Keverel said as Remy drew his sword and faced the silhouette. “Remy. Not yet. We need both of your hands.”

He sheathed his sword and joined the rest of the group at the edges of the fading seal. Its sigils were burnt-out, blackened as if by the fires of the hellish plane they held back. The six of them got their hands under the edges of the seal. Remy looked at Biri-Daar, awaiting a cue. “Hands under the edge,” Biri-Daar said. “Ready. Three. Two. One.”

They lifted. The Seal came away from the portal and the chamber floor, surprisingly light in Remy’s hands. As it did, sulfurous smoke boiled around the edges of the portal and under his feet. Remy felt it begin to slide and rise. It tilted. He fought for his balance. He and Biri-Daar, still on the portal itself, slipped farther from the edge. If they did not let the Seal go, they would pull it out onto the portal… and their straining comrades with it.

Remy and Biri-Daar flung the crumbling Seal away, clearing the boundary between portal and floor. The air around him burned and shimmered and he saw that the portal was starting to sink into the floor. A clear gap emerged on the opposite side of the portal. Demonic shapes scrambled up through it. On the side closest to Remy and Biri-Daar, the honor guard of the Knights of Kul stepped out onto the portal. “Now!” Uliana cried out, her ruined eye leaking tears and blood.

“Now or never,” Biri-Daar growled. She cut down the first demon out onto the portal.

A shape resolved from the shadows along the wall-tall, cadaverous, bearing a staff…

No, Remy thought.

It was not the Road-builder, returning at the last moment as his phylactery the quill burned away to nothingness in Uliana’s hand. Where Remy had expected the Road-builder stood Philomen, vizier of Avankil. But it was a Philomen transformed-his skin pallid, eyes alight with a fire like the fire that bled around the edges of the portal and flicked at the legs of the demons who continued to pour through the gap. The head of his staff, which back in Avankil was a seven-pointed star worked in emeralds and gold, was now a pale green iridescent skull. Like Shikiloa’s, Remy saw-a replica of the Wand of Orcus.

With a flick of one hand, Philomen froze the Knights carrying the Seal. “Look at me, noble dragonborn,” he said, voice low and inviting.

“No!” Biri-Daar roared, but they were looking… and they were falling, unconscious, the seal banging to the floor and crushing one of the knights beneath it. He lay, his life bleeding out of him, eyes unfocused, the pain not reaching through the vision of death Philomen had laid over them. More demons vaulted up through the gap. Remy joined Biri-Daar at the gap, cutting the insectile limbs from a mezzodemon as Biri-Daar slashed the wings and the head from a vrock flapping up behind it.

Philomen called out a word in a language Remy did not recognize. The demons stopped, not advancing but not retreating either. “Remy,” Philomen said, almost kindly. “My most trusted courier. You have completed your errand at last… although not without some unfortunate detours along the way. Come now. All is forgiven. I will take the chisel now, and events will run their destined course.”

Remy removed the chisel from its case, where he had kept it despite the breaking of the magical seals. He let the case fall to the floor and held it up as if it were a knife. “Was it you that time, in Sigil?” he asked. “Did you send me there, mark me, send me back?”

“It wasn’t so direct as all that,” Philomen. “Surely you know that I seldom act so straightforwardly.”

“Until now,” Uliana said.

The hierophant nodded with a glance at the last surviving member of the Mage Trust of Karga Kul. “Until now.”

Uliana stepped forward and confronted him. “This, Philomen, is an act of war by Avankil against Karga Kul. Know that in your lust to serve your master you have doomed not just the people of Karga Kul but the people of your own city as well, since war never leaves either side utterly untouched.”

“Uliana, I fear that I am beyond caring what the Mage Trust thinks. My master made his wishes known; I am pledged to bring those wishes about. Thus the chisel, and the final breaking of this moribund seal, which for too long has prevented the real powers of the planes from taking their rightful place at the head and throne of this world.”

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 their 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.