The seal of Karga Kul

BOOK II

They rode north on a road sometimes covered by sweeping drifts of sand. Remy looked over his shoulder, riding second to last with only Keverel behind him. The road seemed endless in both directions, and he felt as if he was leaving behind something of his former self the farther he rode into the unknown reaches of the Dragondown Coast. The world was his to take.

“Pretty clear which roads find travelers and which don’t, eh?” Lucan said. “Here we go into the real wilderness.”

“At least we’ll get out of this damned desert,” Iriani said.

Kithri waved toward the Serrata. “In the foothills, before we start the climb up into those,” she said, “the country is beautiful.”

“What about after?” Remy asked.

“After? You mean on the Crow Road?” Kithri shook her head. “Never been. Never wanted to go. But,” she sighed, “here I am, going. You can thank Biri-Daar for that.”

“There is no collar around your neck,” Biri-Daar said without looking back.

Kithri rolled her eyes. Around them, the flatness of Crow Fork was giving way to a more broken country. Monoliths of ancient rock stood angled against each other, product of no mortal’s work. The ground, flat enough to bowl on back near Crow Fork, was heaved and crosshatched with small gullies. The road cut through some of them and wound along the edges of others. The sand that maddened travelers on the road to Toradan disappeared and clumps of hardy scrub sprouted at the bases of rocks and in the shelter of gullies. Around them the landscape came to hard-bitten life.

And ahead of them, far ahead, the highest peaks of the Draco Serrata gleamed white in the morning sun.

“I thought the Crow Road was some kind of demon-infested gauntlet of horrors,” Remy said. “This isn’t terrible-looking country.”

Keverel made a sign in the air before touching his heart and his forehead. “Do not joke about it.”

“We’re not on the Crow Road yet,” Lucan said. “This is the road that leads to the Crow Road. It comes to an end at Iban Ja’s bridge. Once we cross that, then we’re on the Crow Road.”

“Who’s Iban Ja?” Remy asked. That was the third or fourth time someone had mentioned the name. “And why is it his bridge?”

The series of great wars between the dragonborn kingdom of Arkhosia and Bael Turath, that of the tieflings, brought down both empires in the end, but amid the blood and suffering shone acts of impossible heroism. Travelers knew these stories and traded them over mugs of ale and the picked-over bones of supper. Remy, who had traveled little and paid less attention to the events of the world beyond Avankil’s walls and docks, had yet to hear those stories. His five companions looked to each other with slight smiles at his naivete; by acclamation Iriani was chosen to tell the story.

“Why me?” he asked.

Kithri pointed to each of the party in turn. “Biri-Daar has no sense of romance and would only fume about the tieflings. Lucan is the only elf in the world who can’t sing, and he wouldn’t be fair because the story involves both Melora and Corellon. Keverel is a cleric and you should never have a cleric tell your stories. I know too many different versions of the story and am not honest enough to be trusted. Remy doesn’t know any versions of the story and is probably too honest to tell it well even if he did. That leaves you, Iriani, even though you have elf blood in you as well.”

“I’ll tell the story as it came to me,” Iriani said.

Kithri nodded. “So start telling. It’s a long way to the bridge.”

The Solstice War between Arkhosia and Bael Turath was not its own war at all, but a change in plans. Yet it was called its own war because of the periods of quiet on either side of it, and because it decisively changed everything that came after. Both combatants were exhausted and winter was on the way; they fell back to their lines, entrenched, and got down to the business of preparing themselves for spring, when snow would retreat from the mountain passes and the gods would give their signals for the great war to begin again.

Then a midwinter thaw changed everything.

Later, the survivors would blame a dispute among the gods Melora, Corellon, and the Raven Queen. The Queen, it was said, was angry that the fighting had stopped so soon because the battlefields were so very good to her black-feathered subjects. But she loved winter too, and was torn between the pleas of the ravens and the immutable paths of the sun and stars.

“Melora,” she said. “The wilderness is yours to command and to love. What of this great bridge the Arkhosians have built across the Gorge of Noon?”

“The Arkhosians are builders,” Melora said. “I cannot interfere with their nature any more than a beaver’s.” In truth, though, her heart stormed at the thought of the bridge.

“But surely the gorge’s majesty would be restored by the destruction of the bridge,” the Raven Queen purred. “Surely you could bring this about. The Arkhosians and the forces of Bael Turath are camped not twenty miles apart, in the lower vales of the Serrata with the bridge between them. Neither force wants to move farther away lest the other claim the bridge and the only passage over the gorge for fifty leagues in either direction.

“In these lower vales, winter is not so bad,” she went on. “But it is still deep in snow, and the passes choke in avalanches. Here is what I need from you.”

Melora’s temper was as wild as the wilderness and seas that she commanded on the earth. She knew what the Raven Queen was doing when she leaned in a little too close and spoke with a husk in her voice. She knew what the Queen was offering and what she was asking in return.

And wild, untamed Melora thought it a workable bargain.

“All I ask of you,” the Raven Queen said, whispering into Melora’s ear as her heart leaped and tossed like the storm-driven surf, “is that you ask a little favor of Corellon…”

Corellon who could sing stones into life! Corellon who lent power to the singer’s voice and the artist’s eye, the mage’s spells and the sculptor’s chisel!

Corellon, who when the seasons were divided at the beginning of the world begged for spring and received it because along with it came the knowledge that everything must ultimately die, that the green abundance of spring is the flare of a candle cupped against the everlasting wind and dark of death. This knowledge is the fuel of art, of thoughts of beauty, of all sorceries light and dark. Corellon is the patron of those who know they will die but are determined that they will bloom and learn and love first.

It is said that Corellon lives in a castle whose rations and dimensions haunt the dreams of artists, adorned with tapestries telling stories the troubadors can never find tongue to repeat. Vine-haired and stone-toothed, Melora strode through the arches of this castle and found Corellon, eyes closed, listening to the music made by dust motes dancing in sunlight.

“How would you like to push the Raven Queen a little?” she asked. Corellon’s eyes opened. Melora scattered the motes and their music jangled into chaos. “How would you like to have a little spring in her winter?”

“If she has sent you, there is more to this offer than what you’re telling,” Corellon answered. “And I can smell her on you, which makes it a simple matter to guess what is motivating your wild little heart.”

“To each her reasons,” Melora said. “Spring in the high country, just for a week. Think of it! What new life might grow, what stories might the peoples of the world tell of your strength in the face of the Raven Queen’s deepest winter?”

“And why is she willing?” Corellon asked.

“She is a good queen to her subjects, who belong to me as well,” Melora said. “The ravens are hungry.”

“Well,” Corellon said. Already he had begun to think of the songs that might be sung. “What the Queen offered you, will you offer me?” he asked, archly, as the sculptures around them began to dance.

That the gods have human desires is known to every child-else why should they have given those desires to us? Ah, the wilderness is fickle!

A southwest wind curled over the passes at sunrise the next day, bringing with it smells of the lower territories where winter was forbidden. For nine days it blew. At the end of the third, each army sent scouts up the passes toward the gorge. Avalanches drove them back.

At the end of the sixth day, each army sent scouts again. They returned, most of them, reporting that the way would be clear if the freakish thaw held for another three days.

And hold for three days it did.

On the morning of the tenth day, the armies marched. On the morning of the twelfth day, they stood on either side of the bridge. By noon of the twelfth day, the bridge ran knee-deep with the blood of human and tiefling, dragonborn and dwarf. The fighting on the bridge went on into the night as both sides mustered sorcerous lights to guide their armies lest they wake up in the morning and find the other side possessing the bridge.

Centuries before, the bridge had been the Arkhosians’ mightiest work of engineering, a monument to the vision of their emperors and the building genius of the dwarves who lived in the caves along the gorge. It was a thousand feet long and wide enough for twenty men to walk across abreast, with buttresses curving down into the walls of the gorge hundreds of feet below. It was large enough that all manner of creatures had taken up residence in its stone eaves and crevices, its drains and arches. The tiefling shock troops of Bael Turath had long since slaughtered the Noon Gorge dwarves, keeping only those as slaves who might teach the Turathian architects the secrets of stone that dwarves seemed to be born with-yet the secrets of the bridge over the gorge remained known only to one man, because only that one man had performed the magics that bound its stones together. The bridge, too, had been a symbol of peace between Arkhosia and Bael Turath… or perhaps it had only come to seem such during a pause between two wars. When it did not carry soldiers, it carried caravans-and then in times of war, soldiers carried back as spoils what the merchants had once carried as goods.

The greatest wizard of the Arkhosians was Iban Ja, confidant to emperors, Seer of Infinitudes, and magical overseer of the dwarf engineers who had built the bridge. He watched the battle from a cliffside perch on the Arkhosian side of the gorge, participating as the battle demanded and commanding the ranks of Arkhosian wizards who found their way across the bridge with the armed soldiery. Iban Ja was a thousand years old, the stories went. Iban Ja had never been born, but made from the bodies of ten great wizards who gave their lives knowing that they would be part of the greatest wizard ever to walk the earth, the other stories went. None of them were true and all of them spoke the truth of the Arkhosians’ regard for him.

He looked down as dawn broke on the thirteenth day and saw the best of the Arkhosian troops, the mighty dragonborn warriors known as the Knights of Kul. A hundred selected from ten thousand, they were the finest foot soldiers in the known world. Any one of them could cut their way through ten men and be laughed at if they got a scratch in the fight.

In the darkness, the Knights had established a foothold on the Turathian side of the bridge. In the hours before dawn they had fought their way to solid ground on the other side of the bridge, laying waste to the Turathian opposition.

And as the sun shone from a bed of clouds in the eastern sky, Iban Ja found himself seeing a fresh new telling of a very old story.

The Knights drove forward, supported by sword and foot of the regular Arkhosian expeditionary force. Behind them, support units set up defensive positions along the ledges of the approach canyon to protect the way back to the bridge. Already that morning the Knights were five hundred yards up the canyon road that, in another hundred miles, would lead to Crow Fork and the market-where, it was said, some of the surviving Noon Gorge dwarves were building labyrinthine dungeons at the request of the market’s council. The Turathian forces were shattered and in full retreat.

But below the bridge, from the mouths of caves drilled out of the living rock so long-dead Noon Gorge dwarves could build the bridge’s arched buttresses, came Turathian sappers. Some of them were human. Some were tiefling. And some, saw Iban Ja, were cambion. It was not the first time he had seen cambion on the other side of a battlefield. He imagined it would not be the last. Yet seeing them there, at the footings of the bridge, Iban Ja felt as if something vital had escaped him and could never be reclaimed.

Clouds covered the sun and wind howled down the gorge from the north. The Raven Queen’s affections turned elsewhere as she saw that her favorites would be fed.

Iban Ja spoke instructions to a stone that carried his voice to every wizard who fought under his command. They turned as one and directed their attacks toward the sappers in the caves, besieging them with magical energies designed to kill the living without damaging the stone underpinnings of the bridge. At that moment, the Turathians played their last card.

On the walls of the gorge above the bridge, stones began to move. They shifted, spread wings, reared fanged heads on long necks, uncoiled tails tipped with hooked stingers. Ridden by cambion hellswords, these fell wyverns swooped down from the heights to tear into the ranks of Arkhosian wizards. The wizards fought back, but the distraction proved critical. Cambion magi worked magics upon the bodies of their tiefling servants while Iban Ja devoted all of his powers to destroying the wyverns. Incinerated, arrow-shot, lightning-struck, they fell from the sky to die on the stones of the bridge or in the depths of the churning river far below.

And as Iban Ja and the Arkhosian wizards returned their attention to the cambion magi, a great shudder ran through the stones of the bridge. Cambion magic drew the ghosts of dead dwarves from the stones and their spectral picks crashed into the most vulnerable seams, where buttress met cliffside and Arkhosian engineering met the ageless genius of nature.

Iban Ja called down a raven that wheeled over the battlefield. “It is your Queen that has done this, is it not?” he demanded.

The raven squawked but consented to speak. “Is this not an unnatural spring?” it answered. “And does not the wilderness rebel against the works of mortals? Beware your blame, wizard. Look you to yourself.”

It cast itself back into the air over the bridge as the last words left its mouth, and the great buttresses on the Turathian side of the gorge slipped, cracked, and fell with a sound like an earthquake into the misty depths of the Gorge of Noon. The span sagged, leaned, split two-thirds of the way across and carried Arkhosian support troops and the bodies of the fallen after the broken buttresses. Unsupported, the remainder of the span jutted creaking out into empty space for a moment longer than Iban Ja thought he could endure-then with a sound like a peal of thunder the entire span broke off and fell end over end into the gorge. The bodies of Iban Ja’s wizard corps fell with it. Those few who managed to fly, and managed to survive the barrage of tiefling arrows, returned to the Arkhosian side to watch in horror as the final part of Bael Turath’s great trap sprang.

From every cave, every notch, every sheltered space below a fallen rock poured tiefling and human, cambion and lesser devil. Like ants they poured blackly over the rocks, overwhelming the Arkhosian troops and closing like a flood around the island formed by the Knights of Kul. Rallying to a defensive posture, the Knights saw the collapse of the bridge. Instantly they knew what had happened. In the falling of the stones they saw their deaths, and with useless clarity they understood that even the most seasoned of soldiers can fall victim to the thrill of battle.

It began to snow. The raven that had answered Iban Ja’s questions wheeled over the broken stub of the bridge.

He killed it with a flick of his fingers. The Raven Queen’s fury would follow him beyond his grave, but Iban Ja did not care for her regard. He rose into the skies over the gorge, flicking aside arrows from the other side, summoning and mastering the wild energies of the storm that blew down the gorge from the great peaks of the Draco Serrata. He did not expect to live through the next hour, but Iban Ja had done a great deal of living; he was interested now in doing a little dying for the empire whose service had dominated his life.

The storm’s winds blew around him, and Iban Ja breathed them in. He found the elemental language of their strength, taught himself to speak it, and commanded the winds to his service.

On the other side of the gorge, the Knights fought their desperate holding action. They saw Iban Ja suspended over the depths and believed without question that he would come to their rescue. Never before had the Knights needed rescue. Perhaps they never would again. Iban Ja commanded the armies on the Arkhosian side of the gorge to rally and prepare. “This will be my last command,” he said. “In the name of every dwarf that carved you, every Arkhosian who died when you fell, every ghost whose unquiet cry shivered your stone, I say to this bridge: Know me. I am Iban Ja. And with the power of the winter wind, I command you rise.”

Lightning crackled through the driving snow. The rumbling of a thousand stones echoed up along the walls of the gorge in counterpoint to the thunder and the howling of the wind. Iban Ja became the center of a whirlwind, the snow spinning so tightly and so densely around him that it appeared to the astonished soldiers as if he had spun himself a cocoon of snow and wind. Below them, blocks of stone rose from the depths of the gorge, the Noon’s waters pouring from them as they came once again to the level of the roads on either side.

No single mortal could rebuild the bridge whose building had taken the work and lives of thousands. Yet such was the power of Iban Ja that he himself, as his body was swept away by his icy whirlwind, brought stones out of the depths and held them there. By force of will and magic, by strength of belief and essence, the stone rose and leveled and hung in space as the cocoon of snow spun apart and revealed that Iban Ja’s body had vanished. Across the gorge stretched a hopscotch pattern of stone blocks, snowswept and icy. On one side, the armies of Bael Turath threatened to overwhelm the Knights of Kul; on the other, the massed forces of Arkhosia stood waiting the order to charge.

The horn of Arkhosia’s generals blew, its note clear and piercing through the canyon winds. Arkhosia’s armies charged. The hordes of Turathian tieflings rose to meet them. The sky filled with arrows and spears, magical energies and the black wings of wyvern and raven. On stones held up by the magical will of Iban Ja, the Solstice War of Arkhosia and Bael Turath came to its awful climax.

The day’s ride had brought the party to a saddle between two peaks along the first row of mountains, with the foothills behind them and the higher ranges of the Serrata ahead. “How much of that is true?” Remy asked when they were settled around the night’s fire.

“All of it,” Iriani said.

“The gods sport with mortals that way?”

“And with one another,” Kithri chuckled.

“Some of them do,” Keverel said. “Some of them do not.”

“Oh yes, Erathis would never do something like that,” Lucan said. “Or Bahamut, that pompous old lizard. He’s the most prudish of the gods. They see him at their god-feasts and wait until he leaves so the real fun can begin.”

Biri-Daar had been silent all day, while Iriani told the story and then while they set up their camp and took care of the horses. Still without saying a word, she caught Lucan a hard backhanded slap to the side of the head. The blow knocked him sprawling, but he rolled and came up with a knife in one hand and his sword in the other. Biri-Daar didn’t look up.

“I don’t care for blasphemy,” she said.

“And I don’t care for paladins thinking they have the right to put their hands on me,” Lucan said. He leveled the sword at Biri-Daar. She put a piece of jerked meat in her mouth, chewed it carefully, and swallowed. All the while Lucan’s sword hand stayed rock-still and his eyes never left her.

Biri-Daar took a drink of water, then said, “I apologize, then. But were things to happen the same way again, I don’t believe I would do anything differently.”

The two of them looked at each other. Some of the tension drained from the moment. Remy realized he had been holding his breath. He exhaled, slowly, not wanting to call attention to how nervous he had been.

“Didn’t someone buy… Lucan. It was you, wasn’t it, who bought the spirits back at the market? Share them around,” Kithri said. “It’s going to be a hard enough trip up the Crow Road without the two of you killing each other the whole way.” She made an insistent beckoning motion. “Come on. Don’t stand around waving your sword when you’re not going to use it. Kill something tomorrow. Tonight, let’s have a drink.”

She kept talking, and eventually Lucan pulled the bottle out of his saddlebag. It went around the fire and the mood lightened as the sky darkened. “Who won, anyway?” Remy said in the middle of a conversation about the kinds of fish that could be caught in the estuary of Karga Kul.

“Who won what?” Iriani asked.

“The battle. The Solstice War.”

“Arkhosia, I think,” Iriani said. But right away Biri-Daar contradicted him.

“At the time, it looked that way,” she said quietly. “But it is not always clear who has won a battle when the crows are still picking the bones of the dead.”

Kithri started singing a vulgar song about a tiefling whorehouse, just to change the mood. Everyone laughed except Biri-Daar. By the time the moon was directly overhead and they knew they had to sleep, Lucan’s mood had swung all the way around. “I’ll watch first,” he offered. Nobody argued.

In the morning Remy woke first, to find Lucan still sitting exactly as he had been when Remy fell asleep. “You took two watches?” he asked.

“One long one,” Lucan said with a slight shake of his head. “The peace does my mind good. And elves don’t need sleep the way you do.”

Remy stretched and poked at the coals of the fire. “Then you can take all of the watches,” he said.

“I didn’t say we didn’t need rest,” Lucan said. “Just that we don’t sleep the way humans do.”

“How do you rest, then?”

“You might call it a kind of meditation,” Lucan said. “To those who don’t do it, it’s difficult to explain.” Fog sat in the valleys between their campsite and the rise into the next range. Remy could just see the road on the other side, winding its way up and to the north. They had been traveling west and northwest for the last day or so.

“How long before we get to the bridge?” he asked.

Lucan shrugged. “I’ve never seen it. Only heard stories. And the only times I’ve been to Karga Kul, I’ve taken ship from Furia.”

“Furia,” Remy repeated. It was the fifth of the grandiosely named Five Cities of the Gulf, the southern bookend to Saak-Opole in the north with Karga Kul, Avankil, and Toradan in the Gulf’s interior. Of them, only Avankil and Karga Kul were real cities; the others might once have been greater, but had become only glorified towns. Still, Remy was smitten with the idea of it. One day, he resolved, I will go to Furia. I will see all five, and those beyond the Gulf.

“I can see what you’re thinking,” Lucan said. “The world’s a marvelous place, for certain. On the other hand, the world can also make you very dead very fast in a very large number of different ways. So keep the stars out of your eyes, boy. Learn.”

Remy nodded as he flipped twigs into the fire. He blew on them until they flared and caught. “I have learned,” he said. “Already.”

Lucan cracked a smile, a rarity for him as far as Remy could tell. “I think you have. There’s always more, though. Don’t forget that. You’ve got a good spark in you,” he added, standing up and stretching. “You might go a long way if you live through this first trip.” The elf cracked his knuckles and went to see to the horses. Often, Remy had observed, he did this before the others awoke. The storied elf affinity for animals and the natural world was strong in Lucan; Remy was starting to think that it made him unfit for the company of the speaking races.

“What’s Furia like?” he asked.

“I think it’s my favorite of the Five,” Lucan said. “Although I hate cities, or any settlements, really. So that’s something like asking me what my favorite aspect of Orcus is.”

The name of the demonic prince took some of the gleam out of the morning. “Odd comparison,” Remy said.

Lucan grinned again as he looked at one of the horses’ teeth. “They told you never to use his name, am I right? That he might hear and be angry that you weren’t being reverent enough? I’ve heard that as well. The truth is, Remy, Orcus doesn’t care what anyone says about him. His human minions might, or might pretend to so Orcus will take notice of them and transform them into one of his hierophants. But if someone told you that Orcus would come and eat you because of something you said, they were just trying to scare you. Who was it, your mother?”

“It’s been a long time since I saw my mother,” Remy said.

“Me too,” Lucan said. His smile faded. “So who was it?”

“Philomen,” Remy said.

“The vizier?”

“Once I was taking a sealed scroll from his chambers to a ship waiting to sail for… I think it was Karga Kul,” Remy recalled. “He told me to run as fast as I could, to stop for nothing. I said that the only thing that would make me run faster was if Orcus was chasing me. He said…

“You don’t want to joke about that. That Orcus isn’t a fit topic for humorous conversation. He said he’s far too real, and far too… I don’t know.”

“Sounds sensible to me,” Lucan said. “But only if you believe that certain topics cannot be joked about. I don’t believe that. Want a bit of advice? You shouldn’t either. Laughter is one of the few things we have that will always be strong against the darkness. You’re going to die, right?”

Remy didn’t say anything. He wasn’t sure it was a question that required an answer. Instead of answering, he added larger sticks to the fire. It was nearly the last of the firewood they had brought from Crow Fork Market; fortunately they wouldn’t have much trouble finding it in the country ahead. Remy could see pine forests growing up the flanks of the mountains. He could smell them as well, as the rising sun burned off the fog and brought out the scents of the foothills.

“Right?” Lucan prompted.

“Right.”

“Right. And if you’re going to die, and you know you can’t prevent it, you might as well laugh at it.”

“How old are you, Lucan?” Remy asked. He heard stirring. The others were awakening, kicking at their blankets and hearing the sound of the fire as it licked up around the fresh fuel.

Lucan shrugged, moving on to the next horse. It was Remy’s, and he paid close attention to what Lucan did. Here was something else he could learn, since he didn’t figure Lucan would be around forever to do it for him. Teeth, ears, eyes, hooves… Remy watched.

“I’m not sure,” Lucan said. “I celebrate my birthday on the spring solstice.”

“Do you have some idea?”

“Seventy, eighty. No matter. I’ve got some years yet to live.”

“Famous last words,” Kithri interjected. She scuffed a spot in the coals for a comically battered metal teapot. Setting it in the ashes, she scooped dried herbs into a spoon of metal mesh and set it on the rim of the mug she was never without. She had brought a loaf of bread to the fire too, setting it on a rock to warm.

“Possibly, Kithri,” Lucan said. “Good morning to you. How old are you, since we’re interested in each other’s natal moments?”

“Forty-four,” she said. “Remy?”

“Nineteen,” he said.

“I can tell you right now you’re by far the youngest of us,” Keverel said. “I have thirty-six years and can guarantee that both Iriani and Biri-Daar are older.”

“And what that means,” Iriani said as he broke off a piece of bread, “is that you should go get water.”

Remy did, a bit annoyed but also satisfied that he was being taken into the group. He was past being grateful but not past appreciating the way Biri-Daar and the rest had brought him along and made him a part of their group.

Part of that, of course, probably had to do with the mysterious enchanted box that swung against his hip as he walked. If they had just wanted to take it, they could have killed Remy easily enough. He was no longer worried about that. He was, however, still conscious that however much they might gesture toward making him a part of the group, they were still more or less forcing him to come along. Now that he had a horse, he could have turned around and headed for Toradan, but…

He looked around, remembering. Scorpions, kobolds, the cacklefiend… they were after him, no doubt about it, which meant they were after what he had. He drew the water, filling everyone’s skins at a freshet that ran down into a narrow gully and disappeared into the valley. Returning with them strung together across his shoulders, he put a question together in his mind and asked it of the first person he saw. “Keverel,” he said. “Should I just open the box?”

The cleric was just standing up after his morning prayers. “What?”

“The box I’m carrying. Why not just open it? If it’s going to draw pursuit either way, wouldn’t we be better off knowing what’s in it?” Remy took it out and tapped the latch with a fingernail. The characters carved in its lid glowed dimly and a buzzing sounded in Remy’s ears.

With both hands held out in front of him, Keverel said, “Don’t.”

“Why not?” Remy felt the latch under his thumbnail. Two of his other fingers pressed against waxen seals worked into the seam under the box’s lid.

“Remy, none of us know what will happen if you do that. You might well not survive it. Do you think Philomen put those seals on it so they would tickle you if you opened it?”

“You’ll die, boy,” another voice said, just off to Remy’s right.

Reflexively he looked in that direction; as he did, Keverel stepped forward and ripped the box from his hands. Remy reached after it and Biri-Daar, who had appeared at his right to distract him, pinned his arms. She held him fast, and after an initial struggle Remy relaxed. “Are you going to stay settled if I let you go?” she asked.

He nodded. “I will.”

Biri-Daar released him. “Remy,” Keverel said. Remy noticed that the rest of the group was watching. “Either we should open this or you should give it to one of us for a while.”

“Open it, then,” he said, knowing they wouldn’t. “Open it.”

Keverel looked at the box, then around. “In favor?”

Only Kithri raised a hand.

Looking back at Remy, Keverel said, “Settled. We’re not going to open it. What we are going to do is deal with whatever appears to take it from you. Then, when we get to Karga Kul, we will seek the help of the Mage Trust in either opening the box, destroying it, or figuring out another course of action.” He looked at the rest. “Yes?”

A round of nods. Keverel looked back to Remy. “It is probable,” he went on, “that every time this box leaves your hands, that draws the vizier’s attention. It is also probable that whatever draws the vizier’s attention draws other attention as well.”

“What he’s saying in his excruciatingly diplomatic way,” Lucan interrupted, “is exactly what Roji told you back at Crow Fork Market. Every time you make one of us take the box away from you, you endanger all of our lives. By Melora, it is about time you understood that.” He stalked back toward the fire, then stopped halfway there. “We didn’t save your life for you to cost us ours!” he called.

Keverel walked up to Remy and held out the box. “I wouldn’t have put it that way,” the cleric said. “Now that it has been said, however, I do not repudiate what Lucan said. Our lives are not yours to toy with because you’re having second thoughts about accepting your package. Take it.”

Remy did.

“Now hold it. Do not open it. Do not complain about it. Show it to no one else until we arrive at Karga Kul. Understood?”

“I understand,” Remy said. “Sorry.”

“We want no apologies,” Biri-Daar said as she walked by him carrying the waterskins he’d dropped when she grabbed his arms. “We want-we need-to be able to rely on you.”

They broke camp and saddled up to ride without saying anything else. It was a quiet day after that, down into the valley and on along the road as it rose toward the next range of the Serrata… until they saw the first of the orcs.

Remy spotted it first, leaning out from an overlook on the steep slope that broke up from the road to their right. Lucan was riding next to him. Without pointing, he said, “Lucan. Orc on the mountain, up to the right.”

In one smooth move, Lucan unslung his bow, nocked an arrow, and fired. The snap of the bowstring got the rest of the party’s attention; they came ready, hands on hilts. At their last river crossing, Remy had picked up a pouch full of lemon-sized stones. He shook his sling loose and fitted a stone into it, looking up the slopes on either side of the road as Lucan’s arrow found its mark. The orc sentry crumpled out of sight. For a moment none of them said anything; they held still, putting every sense to work finding out whether there were any more.

“Should we go make sure?” Kithri said quietly.

Lucan shook his head. “No need.”

“I believe him,” Biri-Daar said. “We go on, but carefully. There is never only one orc.”

Never only one, Remy thought. That was the first one he had ever seen.

“And where there are orcs, there are usually hobgoblins giving their orders,” Biri-Daar added.

The followers of Gruumsh had been the material of stories to scare the children of Avankil since Remy had been old enough for his elders to want to frighten him. He had always known they were real, but until seeing that one Remy had never expected to see an orc in the flesh. He certainly hadn’t seen it for long.

And now he was learning that they were serving the hobgoblins. It was as if all of the fables Remy had heard as a child were coming to life around him.

“Wouldn’t be surprised to see ogres before it’s all over,” Kithri said.

The horses’ hooves clipped along the ancient stones. They looked up and saw nothing except scrubby pine trees and hawks riding the updrafts along the faces of the mountains that rose up around them. Occasionally a lizard skipped between rocks. Every motion wore at their nerves a little more. “Bring them,” Lucan repeated every so often. “Bring them. Anything to kill the suspense.”

About an hour after the first sighting, they saw smoke in the sky ahead. An hour later, the road rose next to a tumbling creek until they crested a ridge and discovered the source. There had once been a farmstead there; three or four thatched outbuildings arranged around a central home with stone walls and a beam roof. They could tell it was a beam roof because the charred stumps of some of the beams still angled up from the top edge of the walls. The outbuildings were collapsed into smoking rubble. In the yard just outside the doorway lay a body, facedown. Not far away lay a dog, eviscerated, its limbs cut off and flung away. They approached and Keverel said, “Gnawed the bones. Not just of the dog.”

“Who lives out here?” Kithri said. “Might as well beg the passing orcs to stop for lunch. Until the ogres eat them in turn.”

“A bit of respect for the dead,” Biri-Daar said.

They looked around to see if there were survivors, but found none. “Not a terrible place,” Lucan said. “Fish in the river, deer in the valleys. Enough sun for a garden. I would settle down here. Right at the edge of where the mountains rise up.” Tears stood in the elf’s eyes. “Biri-Daar, I realize that our errand is of terrible import, but if there is an afternoon to spend killing orcs I would consider it a boon.”

Iriani looked out across the clearing, across the road to where the ridge curled and rose farther into a maze of notched canyons. “An afternoon well spent,” he said.

From inside the house, where she had gone to ensure there were no survivors, Biri-Daar emerged. “At times, one must put aside an errand to spend an afternoon in charity.”

The orcs’ track wasn’t hard to follow. It led across the meandering river at a broad ford less than a mile along the road from the sacked homestead. From there it climbed at an angle away from the road, following an old landslide scar up to an overhung ledge where a pair of orcs stood cracking bloody bones in their teeth. Lucan dropped one of them with an arrow and Remy the other with a slung stone. Immediately Kithri appeared from the scrub at the side of the ledge to make sure both were dead. At a hand signal from her, the rest of the party made their way to the ledge. The overhung hollow opened into a cave. Without hesitation they fell into the order of battle that had already become their unspoken habit. Biri-Daar and Keverel led, flanked by Lucan and Remy, with Kithri and Iriani immediately behind. They stormed down the main passage, kicking aside heaps of stinking refuse and making it all the way to the first split before they encountered resistance.

Surging out from the pitch-dark depths of both branches, the orcs swarmed them. As soon as it happened, their order of battle meant nothing. Orcs were everywhere, trampling over their dead to overwhelm the invaders. They were subhuman, savage beasts living in filth, destroying all that was beautiful. All of Remy’s childhood stories came to life; he cut them down as fast as they got within range of his sword, and still there were more. Light blazed along the ceilings of the passages, revealing broken-off stalactites and the teeming forms of the orcs. Keverel had brought the light, and in the sudden illumination Iriani could see where all of his comrades were. Remy saw him step off to one side, putting himself against the wall; Remy went with him, anticipating that the wizard would be planning something magical and would need protection to complete it.

He was right. As soon as he got there, he deflected challenges from a cluster of orcs and then the branch passageway exploded in a crackle of fire that incinerated every orc in sight. The fire vanished and the rush of air drew the air from Remy’s lungs.

In the other passage, Biri-Daar and Lucan were hewing their way through the remaining orcs. The rest of the party joined them and together they punched into the chamber at the heart of the orcs’ lair… just as the surviving orcs scattered and a pair of ogres appeared, flanking a larger orc with ritualized scars surrounding the open socket of the eye he had sacrificed to his god. “Eye of Gruumsh,” Lucan said. “You, orc! Elf here!”

As clumsy a ploy as it was, it worked perfectly. The god of the elves, Corellon, had gouged the eye from the orc patron Gruumsh. The orcs who mimicked that wound nurtured a hatred of elves and all things elven.

The Eye of Gruumsh said something in Orcish and the ogres lumbered forward, both to protect it and to destroy the elf interloper. Biri-Daar met one of them head on, stepping inside the looping swing of its morningstar and opening its guts with a hooked thrust. The other ogre swatted Lucan down to his knees and the Eye of Gruumsh sprang closer for the kill, its battle cry nearly drowning out the dying roars of the gutted ogre. It had its spear raised, its mouth open, its one good eye wide in triumph-until Kithri’s thrown knife flashed across the chamber and struck at an angle up through the roof of its mouth.

Its cry trailed off and the spear thrust drove through Lucan’s shoulder instead of his ribs, the spear head snapping off on the stone floor. Staggering, the Eye of Gruumsh took another blow as a second knife snapped into the hollow of its throat under the jaw. It dropped straight down, still gripping the haft of the broken spear.

Remy and Biri-Daar pressed the remaining ogre. If there were any more orcs about, they had fled into the deeper recesses of the cave. The ogre fought with a fire-hardened wooden club, broken blades hammered into its head. Knowing it was outnumbered, the ogre backed toward an opening in the cave, forcing them to approach it from the front. Its club made a heavy whoosh with every swing, each powerful enough to splinter a row of skulls and fan their brains out across the nearest wall.

Even an ogre’s strength has limits. Biri-Daar, fearless with the strength of her god, pressed near the limit of the club’s range. She timed the swing and the backswing-once, twice. On the third, she stepped inside and jammed her sword up under the ogre’s armpit. The ogre clamped the wounded arm around the dragonborn paladin, crushing her to it in a suffocating embrace. The club dropped; with its free hand, the ogre tore Biri-Daar’s sword free of its flesh and threw it away.

Then Keverel was there, smashing his mace into the arm that held Biri-Daar. With him came Remy, his blade flicking out in search of the vulnerable gaps in the ogre’s hide armor. Iriani protected the rear, destroying the occasional straggling orc as it appeared.

Last, and most lethally, came Kithri, dancing between the ogre’s legs to open the artery on the inside of its thigh. She was fast, and the ogre was terribly wounded-still it was fast for its size, catching her with a spastic kick that smashed her into the wall. She cried out and rolled away as the mortally wounded ogre toppled against the wall above her and slid down, its wounded leg unable to hold its weight and its lifeblood spilling in a thick fall from shoulder and thigh. Remy stepped in again, thrusting deep into the pit of its stomach. It flailed at him, missing, and Biri-Daar fell away from it, fighting free of its grasp as it slid down the wall and died.

Before it had drawn its last breath, Remy vaulted the body and kneeled next to Kithri. Her face was wild with pain, her teeth bared and gritted. When he picked her up to carry her back to Keverel, she cried out again. “Hush,” Lucan said heartlessly, whatever native tact he possessed temporarily driven out by his own wound. “You’ll draw whatever else lives back in these caves.”

Kithri might have said many things. Instead she took his advice, clamping her mouth shut even when Remy laid her down on the hard stone next to Lucan. She did manage to glare at him; he winked in return.

While Keverel did what he could to heal them both, Biri-Daar called Remy over. “We need to follow these two passages as far as we can, to make sure we got them all,” she said. “There have been no young, which means this is a raiding party. Probably they only planned to stay here a few weeks, until they had despoiled the area. If we had gotten here a few days earlier…” She trailed off and Remy instantly knew what she was thinking.

If they had not stopped to save him, they would have found the orcs before they destroyed the homestead back in the ridge clearing. Saving his life had cost the lives of anyone there.

“It’s a fool’s choice,” Iriani said softly. He too could see where Biri-Daar’s thoughts had gone. “When you can tell the future, paladin of Bahamut, then you may reprimand yourself for telling it incorrectly.”

Biri-Daar looked at him, then around at the carnage. “Let us search and make sure this place is cleansed of its filth,” she said.

“And do bring back whatever you find that is both light and valuable,” Lucan added. He caught his breath as Keverel sank a needle into the meat of his shoulder. “Hurry, before this murderous cleric puts an end to me.”

“We should have such fortune,” Kithri muttered. Her voice sounded odd to Remy but he put the thought out of his mind. Biri-Daar had ordered him to clear out the back tunnels, and clear out the back tunnels he would. Keverel knew his business.

Remy found nothing in the rear tunnels, even when assisted by a cantrip of Iriani’s that set a pleasant light glowing from the buckle of his belt. Trash, bones, filth. Nothing else. He returned the way he had come, carefully, and found both Lucan and Kithri sitting up. “Time to go,” Iriani said.

“This is an awful place,” Lucan groused. “Odor enough to kill you dead, orcs and ogres nearly enough to kill you all over again…”

“… And nothing to show for it,” Kithri finished for him.

“Perhaps it is just that the two most larcenous members of our group did not participate in the search,” Biri-Daar suggested without looking at either of them. She was working with a row of damaged scales on her arm, picking loose the bits that would not heal.

Everyone else in the cave looked at one another to be sure that the paladin had in fact told a joke. They were never sure.

It was true that their search had yielded very little that was valuable, and of that virtually nothing that was light. The only thing of any value was an enormous mirror framed in what looked like silver. Iriani had found it leaning up against a dead end in one of the side tunnels. He could detect no magic in it. “Break off the frame and let’s take it with us,” Kithri said.

Everyone ignored her. Some of them did take the chance to regard the progress of their beards. Of the three who had to shave, none had since leaving Crow Fork Market. “Soon we’ll all look like dwarves,” Iriani said upon seeing himself. “Dwarves who have spent time on the rack.”

When they emerged into daylight again and found their horses cropping the brush at the edge of the river, less than two hours had passed since Remy and Lucan had cut down the two orcs snacking on the ledge. The sun was dropping toward the western peaks. “We’ve wasted the afternoon on this,” Keverel said. “None of us wants to camp so close to that nest, I would guess.”

“You would guess correctly,” Biri-Daar said. “But few of us would wish to go much farther.”

“Then over the next pass,” Lucan said.

Kithri spat from her horse. “This pass, that pass. What difference does it make?”

“Over the next pass is into the final climb toward Iban Ja’s bridge,” Lucan said. “I don’t think we’ll find any orcs or ogres up there.”

“Why not?” Remy asked.

“The cambions and hobgoblins scare them away. Or slaughter them,” Iriani said.

Nodding, Lucan added, “That’s if the sorrowsworn don’t get them first.”

“Sorrowsworn?” Remy had never heard the name. Or term.

“Perhaps you will have the good fortune not to find out,” Iriani said. Nobody would say anything else about it. They rode on, and camped beyond the next pass, alighting from their horses just as the last of the sun vanished behind the mountains, its dying rays slanting up into the sky.

As it turned out, they did not reach Iban Ja’s bridge until the second day after they cleaned out the lair of orcs. Biri-Daar was reluctant to push the pace while Kithri and Lucan were recovering from their wounds. When they did come to the bridge, Remy realized that everything he had heard about it-and by that time he had heard quite a lot-had utterly failed to prepare him for the reality of seeing it for himself.

They had just stopped for lunch at the head of a slot canyon through which the road angled down, following the canyon floor. Already Remy could hear a distant roar, but despite what Biri-Daar and Lucan said, he could not believe that was the sound of a tributary river to the Blackfall, rumbling from the bottom of a gorge said to be a thousand feet deep. “What is it really?” he asked with an uncertain smile. They shook their heads and said if he didn’t believe them, he would just have to see for himself.

Which now he was.

The road ended in a tumble of scree that fell a few dozen yards to the lip of the gorge itself. Remy couldn’t see its bottom from where they stood. Around them reared up impassable walls of stone, with the narrowest of ledges on the left side of the scree.

And ahead of them, hanging impossibly in the empty air, was the Bridge of Iban Ja. Remy tried to count the stones, but could not. Some of them were larger than the house where he had last taken a meal in Avankil. Some were no larger than a man. Gathered together, they were a mosaic impression of a bridge, the gaps between them sometimes narrow enough for a halfling to tiptoe across and sometimes wide enough that no sane mortal would endeavor the jump without wings. Bits of cloth on sticks fluttered from cracks in some of the rocks, the guideposts of long-past travelers. All of the stones moved slightly, rocking in the winds that howled through the Gorge of Noon as if they floated on the surface of a gentled ocean, or a wide and flat stretch of river. Snow clung to some of them, and drifted in sculpted shapes across the flat edges of others.

“Well,” Kithri said, “now we’ve seen it. Biri-Daar, what did you say the other way across this gorge was?”

“It involves traveling fifty leagues off the road to a ford,” Biri-Daar said. “We have no time. I have crossed Iban Ja’s bridge before. It held me. It will hold you.”

“And by this point, crossing it is no longer a matter of choice,” Keverel chimed in.

“Is that so,” Kithri began. She saw Keverel pointing back up the road, turned to see what he was indicating, and saw-as Remy did at that exact moment-the band of tieflings standing in the road behind them. As they watched, the band of perhaps a dozen was fortified with ten times as many hobgoblin marauders.

Remy had seen fewer tieflings than dragonborn. The dragonborn in Avankil had their clan hall, and conducted business when they had business to conduct. The city’s tieflings, perhaps sensitive to the permanent stain on their heritage, kept to themselves when they could. When they dealt with non-tieflings, their bravado and short tempers resulted in vexed interactions. Everyone Remy had ever known, from Quayside toughs to Philomen the vizier himself, had warned him to steer clear of tieflings.

Now here he was, his back to a pathway of rocks floating in midair, facing a large number of exactly those creatures he had been told his entire life to avoid. Remy touched the box hanging at his side and wondered what it might have contributed to this turn of events. He imagined that, if they survived the next hour, Lucan and the others might have similar questions.

“It seems that some of these tieflings still believe they fight for Bael Turath,” Lucan observed.

“And that we, somehow, wear the colors of Arkhosia,” Kithri added. “Well, we do have a dragonborn with us.”

“It gets worse,” Lucan said.

“I can hardly see how,” Kithri said.

“I can,” Iriani said. “Out there on the bridge, see that? That is a cambion magus.”

Something about his tone struck up a quiet, creeping fear in Remy’s mind. Iriani, who had faced down everything they had seen thus far without batting an eye, now paused. “Devil’s offspring,” Iriani said. “You must not speak to it. These magi have the gift of deceit. They would talk any of you right off the bridge.”

“You’re assuming any of us are going on the bridge,” Kithri said. She was up on a rock at the very edge of the cliff, looking down into the gorge. “If,” she added, “you can call it a bridge. Whoever named it, I’m guessing, had never laid eyes on it.”

“I read once that Iban Ja’s ghost lives inside one of the stones,” Keverel said. “One wonders whether he would be an ally or foe.”

More tieflings and hobgoblins spilled from crevices in the canyon walls. “Time to find out,” Biri-Daar said. “Unless we’d rather fight our way through them and go back to Toradan.”

“I think I would rather do that,” Kithri said. “But I also think you were making a bad attempt at a joke.”

“And I think that your sense of humor is not nearly as well-developed as you assume,” Biri-Daar said. “Iriani. Let us go and rid the world of a cambion.”

She leaped to the first block and crossed it in three steps. Iriani followed. As they stepped across the next gap, the hobgoblins gathered at the end of the road charged with a roar. Behind them, the tieflings cocked crossbows and fired, getting the range to the nearest part of the bridge. Kithri danced down the rock face to the edge of the scree, flicking a stream of daggers at the mass of hobgoblins before she made a running jump toward the first stone of Iban Ja’s bridge. She landed at the stone’s edge and tumbled, springing to her feet. Right behind her came Lucan, nocking and firing arrows with uncanny elf grace as he picked his way backward down the scree before firing off a last shot and turning to skip across the void to the stone.

Shoulder to shoulder, Remy and Keverel backed their way toward the edge of the cliff, skirting the rim of the scree slope to the place Kithri had selected for her leap. “My ancestors were citizens of Bael Turath,” the cleric said. “We were one of the few families who refused to take part in the diabolical pact that created these tieflings. I do believe they would hold that against me if they knew.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t tell them,” Remy said.

The leaders of the hobgoblin charge reached them, four abreast; among them came tieflings as well, bearing the cruelly carved blades of their kind. “We should go,” Keverel said. “Remy.”

“What?” Remy said, thinking the cleric was talking to him. He glanced to his left and saw that Keverel had spoken over his mace, which glowed briefly with a pale light before Keverel deflected the first tiefling’s swing and stove in its skull with a blow of his own. At the contact, Remy felt a surge of strength; his sword grew light in his hands; he flicked aside two wild attacks, pivoting between the pair of tieflings to hamstring one and sink the blade half-deep in the other’s back.

A blow rang across the back of his helmet and Remy’s eyes swam. He heard the whistle of an arrow passing close and the gargled scream of an enemy trying to breathe into punctured lungs. The blows of Keverel’s mace, steady as the tolling of a bell, marked the time as they fought a slow retreat to the edge of the cliff, with Lucan and Kithri killing from distance while Biri-Daar and Iriani made their way ever closer to the cambion magus at the midpoint of the bridge.

“Go,” Keverel said when they reached the edge. “You first.”

Remy didn’t argue. It was in the cleric’s nature to send others first. He jumped, clearing the gap easily, and landed on his feet. Keverel was right behind him. As soon as they turned back to the cliff edge, the hobgoblins started to follow. Not all of them made the jump; some caught the edge of the stone and then slipped to fall screaming into the misty depths of the gorge. Others slipped or were pushed off the cliff face by the press of their charging comrades. The tiefling crossbowmen, abandoning the idea of Iban Ja’s bridge altogether, had started working their way up the sides of the canyon wall in search of shooting positions. One of them reached a ledge thirty feet or so above Kithri’s former perch. It was taking aim when Lucan noticed and picked it off.

“That won’t be the last one,” he said. “We’re going to need to get out into the middle before too many more of them get up there.”

From stone to stone they leaped. The larger ones moved not at all at the impact of mortal foot, but landing on the smaller ones was precarious because they dipped and tilted from the fresh weight. Remy quickly discovered that the old bits of cloth and their stakes were a reliable guide to a safe passage using stones of sufficient size, and he thanked all of the gods-not just Pelor-for the life and work of the unknown traveler who had set them there. “Hold them here for a moment,” Keverel panted as they gained an especially large block set at an angle to the rest, so that anyone wishing to make the leap onto it had to land on one corner. Remy and Keverel waited for Kithri and Lucan to make the jump with them. Together the four held back five times that number of hobgoblins.

“Where do they all come from?” Kithri wondered aloud.

Lucan loosed an arrow at something only he had seen, back toward the lip of the gorge. “The halls of the dwarves that lived in the gorge, I’d guess. It was one of the places their ancestors lived after they drove the dwarves out.” He nocked and fired another arrow. “Cambion back there, too.”

“Still?” Kithri skipped off to one side for a better perspective.

“No, was,” Lucan said. “But don’t be surprised if there are more of them spotted in among the tieflings here.”

Behind them, Biri-Daar and Iriani were within fifty feet of the cambion magus. Landing after her most recent leap, the dragonborn faced the cambion magus and clashed her sword and shield together. “Make way and live, devil,” she said. “Or remain and die. It’s all the same to me.”

The cambion spread his arms in a welcoming gesture. “After the battle,” he said, “I will find your head at the bottom of the gorge. I will place it next to my hearth and I will make it speak those words again and again.”

Hellfire arced between the magus’s hands. Iriani landed alongside Biri-Daar on the first stone of the bridge as flames curled out of Biri-Daar’s nostrils. The thrill of battle burned through her. With an enemy before her, she knew who she was. Together they strode to the next gap and cleared it in a long step. They paused, waiting for the stone under their feet to stop rocking. Three stones remained between them and the cambion.

“Quickly there!” Lucan called over his shoulder. Crossbow bolts were beginning to fall around them as the tieflings found the range. They were forced to give up their position, which meant giving up that entire block all at once; the moment they stepped back, hobgoblins leaped across and pursued them to the next gap. It turned into a sprint punctuated by reckless leaps across greater and greater gaps. Kithri slowed their pursuers down somewhat with a scattering of caltrops in their wake. A half-dozen hobgoblins pulled up with punctured feet, bogging down those that came behind until they were shoved out of the way.

That gained them a full stone of distance, with two gaps. They turned and poured arrows, sling stones, and throwing knives into the front rank of their pursuers, slowing but not stopping them.

Then out of the caves that lined the gorge, where once the tieflings of Bael Turath had undermined the great bridge, came the black wafting shapes of sorrowsworn.

“I was afraid of this,” Iriani said. He and Biri-Daar were two jumps from the cambion magus. He had spent the trip drenching the two of them in every protective magic he could think of while they said their prayers to Corellon and Bahamut that the devil’s Abyssal magics would not overcome them.

Now the sorrowsworn-three of them, surrounded by the flickering midnight torrent of what could only be shadowravens-meant that he was going to have to divide his attentions. With a sweeping gesture, Iriani erected a magical barrier that would slow the sorrowsworn. At the same time he looked back toward where his four companions were slowing the pursuit of the tieflings. “Sorrowsworn!” he cried out. “Keverel!”

The cleric turned and saw the sorrowsworn. Immediately he dropped his shield to brandish his holy symbol of Erathis in their direction. “You slivers of death, fragments of the Shadowfell itself,” he intoned. “You haunters of battlefields, reapers of souls. You will not take those under the protection of Erathis!”

At the god’s name, the rising sorrowsworn slowed. The brilliance of Keverel’s holy light held them back… but the shadowravens swarmed around the stones, looking for a way in.

“Biri-Daar, finish this!” the cleric called. If the sorrowsworn got close, their trickery would get inside the mind of whoever they seized on first. They fed on despair and relished the final thoughts of the suicides they created. In the midst of a battle, one moment of distraction caused by uncertainty or remembered failure could be decisive. The sorrowsworn could not approach too near, but they could reach out and find one who might be prey to their wiles.

In the same way wordly fire burned wood, the cambion’s magian fire was fueled by the soul. It raised its staff and Biri-Daar’s mouth opened in a scream as she felt the soulscorch burn through her. By her side, Iriani did the same-and both of them, strengthened by their gods and by the wordly powers of the cleric Keverel, survived the soulscorch and kept on. Iriani blew across his palm, and a film of ice appeared on the block where the cambion magus stood. It slipped, reaching out to break its fall and melt the ice with a fiery discharge. Steam masked it for a moment as the ice boiled away; when the gorge’s winds blew the steam away, Biri-Daar stood before it.

It struck at her with fire. She struck back with steel. Again fire blazed from the cambion, washing over the dragonborn to leave her charred and smoking-and again she answered with a sword stroke, cracking its staff in two. The discharge of the staff’s hellish energy enveloped them both in a swirl of fire; when it faded, Biri-Daar opened her mouth and spat out a long tongue of her own fire.

“You guessed wrong, devil,” she said, and struck the cambion magus down to its knees. Then she struck it again, bringing her sword down across its back and crushing it to the ancient stone of the bridge. The cambion magus lay still. Its blood spread black in the cracks of the stone. Biri-Daar kneeled to send it on its way.

“Bahamut watches me as I prove myself worthy,” she growled, flames licking from her mouth. “Your masters turn their backs. Take that knowledge with you when you stand at hell’s gates and beg admission.”

She stood and clashed sword and shield once more. “Tieflings of the gorge, your magus is dead!”

A cry went up among the tieflings, yet still they pressed forward, driven by the hobgoblins behind and among them. Biri-Daar saw this and for the first time since Remy had known her, he saw uncertainty on her face. It lasted only a moment, and disappeared in a gout of fire as she threw her head back and roared. “To me!” she cried. “To the other side!”

From stone to stone came the other four as Iriani held off the sorrowsworn, who were too fearsome an adversary to fight directly should they get near enough to use their life-stealing scythes. The Raven Queen, thought Iriani, still had an interest in this bridge even after all those years, the centuries since the fall of Arkhosia. Iriani’s power was a river like the Blackfall, turbulent, channeled only by the deep canyon walls of his will. And while he arrested the sorrowsworn’s deadly march, Iriani lost sight of the cambion magus after he saw Biri-Daar cut it down. He took it for granted that the magus was dead and that the tieflings would flee in disarray. One moment of uncertainty, of inattention. An old story, told again and again and never the less true for all of its repetitions.

O wizard you have failed your companions, you have failed yourself, you have turned your back on the adversary while he still plots against you.

The dying cambion magus harbored hopes of finding an afterlife in the Nine Hells that exceeded what it had found in the mortal realms. It had killed many and for years kept the bridge from being reborn as a path of commerce that might have united the cities of the Dragondown. Now, as the life drained from it and the black blood of its body spilled over the sides of the rock where it lay, disappearing into spray long before it found the roiling waters of the Noon a thousand feet below. The cambion magus knew that if it died there, the mortal interlopers would roll its body off the rock, to smash against the rocks or be torn to bits in the rapids. That was all right. He would stand before his infernal masters and claim that his deeds on the mortal plane merited rank and servants in the infernal realms.

Fool.

His final bit of proof would be this half-elf wizard who even now stood within arm’s reach, resolutely defying the charge of the sorrowsworn and the shadowravens who flocked about them.

Fools die and you are a fool, first. You will die, and then because of you, all of your companions.

The cambion’s mouth was dry. It had to speak the charm three times before making all of the sounds correctly. And then it knew that as the last syllable left its mouth that this final spell would kill it. There was no regret in this knowledge. The spell would kill another as well.

The shadowravens boiled in a cloud around the stones of Iban Ja’s bridge, unable to approach because of Iriani’s protective charm and the energies of Erathis and Bahamut projected through Keverel and the paladin Biri-Daar. The six adventurers had slaughtered tieflings beyond counting, and the cambion magus charged with holding the bridge lay dying; the far side was nearly gained.

Then Iriani looked down, toward the sorrowsworn, and his charms faltered. “No,” he said. He began to turn, his face a terrible mask of helpless realization and terror, but before he ever saw the magus again, the wizard Iriani immolated in a pillar of soulfire. It burst from the twin seats of the soul in head and heart, annihilating Iriani’s body in the time it took for his comrades to feel the heat. The cambion magus died knowing it had succeeded; Iriani died knowing he had been close, so close to delivering his comrades through to the next stage of their errand. As quickly as the blast of soulscorching fire appeared, it blazed out, leaving Iriani’s body unmarked but lifeless, to topple sideways onto the edge of the rock. The body rested there for a moment. Maybe it was the wind that took it in the end, or the heavy tread of a man or elf or hobgoblin fighting for its life that rocked the stone just enough. Or perhaps the last escaping breath of an elf wizard named Iriani, native to the forests that blanket the mountains that give rise to the Whitefall on its course toward Karga Kul and the ocean, was enough to settle the body so that it tipped, bit by bit, over the edge. And fell.

The cambion magus was dead and smiling. And the shadowraven swarm began to press closer.

“Break!” screamed Biri-Daar. “To the far side! Run!”

They ran, pursued by the last of the tieflings, slashing their way through shadowravens that cut them terribly with undead beak and talon. For the rest of his life Remy would remember the shadowraven talon that slashed along his forehead seeking his eyes. Through the spatter of his own blood he saw his sword cut through it, saw the blade tear the shadowraven into tatters of shadow that blew away in the winds of the gorge. They ran and leaped from stone to stone, finding the other side together, fighting the last of the tieflings as they scrambled up the ruined giant’s playground of fallen and tilted stone blocks that remained of that side of Iban Ja’s bridge.

When they were across, the tieflings and hobgoblins fell back. Not just to the next stone away from the surviving portion of the bridge. They fell back stone by stone until they reached the exact center of the gorge. There they raised their swords and spears, clashing them on shield and roaring a song of victory.

“Did they win?” Lucan panted. “I didn’t think they won.”

“We’re here,” Biri-Daar. “But Iriani is not.”

“I saw him fall,” Remy said.

Kithri was nodding. “Me too. He was already dead.”

Looking out over the mass of hobgoblins and tieflings, Biri-Daar said, “So should we be. The shadowravens do not follow, the sorrowsworn retreat to their lair. The rest come only halfway. Why?”

Lucan was looking at the road that stretched ahead of them, from the lip of the gorge into a misty and forested middle distance. “I have a guess,” he said.

Behind them, the tieflings sang. Biri-Daar looked at them with hate plain on her face. When they had caught their breath, though, she led them away and would say no more about their passage across the Bridge of Iban Ja.

Not even when Kithri tried to provoke her. “You weren’t quite yourself out there, paladin,” she said lightly after they had walked a few hours into the woods. “Shouting, demonstrating…”

“It got those tieflings into a frenzy, that’s certain,” Lucan added.

Biri-Daar raised a hand, palm out toward them. “Do not try to bait me. If Iriani’s death is on my head, I will know it. I will repent of it. Keverel, I would speak with you a moment.”

The cleric followed her a little way apart from the group. The rest of them walked in a loose group. They had no horses, no packs; they would be living from what they could forage until the next settlement, and none of them knew where that settlement might be. “When I passed through here some years ago,” Lucan said, “there was a trading post near where the Crow Road emerged from these woods.”

“Bring on the dancing girls,” Kithri said with as much sarcasm as she could muster.

“Your tongue is somewhat dulled of late,” Lucan said. “I fear for your health.”

“I fear for yours if you don’t hold your tongue,” she snapped.

Remy saw the stresses pulling at the group. He said nothing. It was not yet his role to have something to say. He walked. They all walked, in small groups that shifted and broke and reformed as they rose away from the Gorge of Noon into the highland forest on its eastern rim. None of them had much to say because each of them had much to think. Iriani, dying, weighed on their minds.

“These woods are touched,” Lucan said sometime later, when dusk was nearly total and they had resigned themselves to a night of sleeping rough.

“Feywild?” Keverel said softly.

Lucan nodded, looking around. “They will show themselves when they wish to,” he said.

Which was just at the moment of full dark, when Remy could no longer see a trace of color in the woods around him or on his own clothes. “Travelers,” came a voice from the trees to their left. “It is forbidden to traverse this part of the road without the permission of the Lord of the Wood.”

Lucan answered first. “I can see you, elf. And you can see me. Come out and let us talk like civilized beings.”

“You know you don’t belong here,” the elf said, appearing at the side of the road. “The stink of the city is in your clothes.”

“I belong where I choose to go,” Lucan said.

“No. You may choose to go anywhere. But you may not choose whether the people already there decide you belong.” The elf winked at them, sporting cruelty in his smile. “Same for your half-breed who didn’t make it this far. It’s the curse of mixed blood, I’m afraid.”

There might have been blows exchanged then. On both sides hands fell to sword hilts and eyes locked, gauging defenses and reflexes and-most importantly-intent. More elves appeared from the trees.

Then another figure on horseback spoke, and everyone else present realized that he had been there for the entire exchange even though none of them had heard him approach. “Easy, Leini. They’ve lost a friend,” he said. “They shouldn’t have to endure your baiting after that.”

“This is none of your business, Paelias,” the elf Leini said.

“I believe it is. These travelers, who have spent their day fighting the tieflings and killing off the cambion magus of the old bridge, deserve better than your hostility.” Paelias turned to Biri-Daar. “You may stay until your companions have healed enough to go on. But we want no traffic with the wars of the outside, or the hatreds of this world. You survived the bridge; for that we offer you respect, and a meal, and a dry place to spend the night. Please don’t ask for more. Even if,” he finished, glancing at the sharp-tongued Leini, “he provokes you.”

He dropped from his horse to the ground, executing a bow and flourish in the same motion. “Paelias is my name, as perhaps you have overheard,” he said. “This is Leini and these are his associates. They live in these woods and I have traveled, which means that my manners are superior to theirs and that I am more handsome, despite our common heritage. Leini and his kin live in these woods and dispose of the tieflings who stray within its boundaries, but-as your elf companion noted back down the road-there is a bit of the Fey in this forest as well. It is my home, at least when I am not somewhere else… and you would not be shocked, I think, to know that other eladrin reside here.”

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

“And cambion magus-killing,” Kithri said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Let’s talk it over,” Kithri said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And what had happened?” Lucan asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You were watching,” Kithri said.

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

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