The seal of Karga Kul

BOOK III

They emerged from the elves’ forest the next morning. The country around them was still wooded, but more sparsely. Sunlight reached the ground there, and the air was heavy with the scents of alpine summer. “Now we’re on the Crow Road,” Lucan said. He pointed up to the trees that lined the road, and Remy saw them: crows standing sentinel, one in the top branches of each tree.

Mindful of the story he had heard about how Iban Ja’s bridge had gotten the way it was, he asked, “Are those crows or ravens?”

Lucan laughed. “Most people can’t tell the difference. These are crows. But you’ll see ravens along the way. You’ll see just about everything if you travel the Crow Road from one end to the other.”

“And what is at the other end?”

“Well, that depends. Either you get off before the end and work your way through the Lightless Marsh to… this sounds strange, but there’s a place where the Lightless Marsh isn’t lightless anymore. That’s the best way I can explain it. You get to that place, and you realize that you have somehow re-emerged into the world from wherever you were before. Which, if you’re traveling the Crow Road, is everywhere. And anywhere.”

“And if you don’t get off? If you see the Crow Road through all the way to its end?” Remy pressed.

“Well,” said Lucan slowly, “then you reach the Inverted Keep.”

“The Inverted Keep?” Paelias looked amazed. “Really? I understood that to be a legend.”

“Most people in the Dragondown would say the same about Iban Ja’s bridge,” Lucan said. “But they are both real.”

“Most of them would also say it about the Crow Road,” Keverel added.

Paelias nodded and scanned the treetops for more crows. “True enough. Yet here we are.”

“Is it called the Crow Road because crows sit in the trees?” Remy asked. “They do that everywhere.”

“It’s called the Crow Road…” Kithri started, then stopped. She looked at Lucan.

“What?” he said.

“You tell the story,” Kithri said. “If you don’t, you’ll just complain about how one of us does it wrong.”

In the years before Arkhosia and Bael Turath put their stamp on the world, a great and now forgotten empire arose in the highlands between the Blackfall and Whitefall rivers. So long ago did it rise and fall that even most of its ruins are destroyed and gone, and its languages and arts, its deeds both villainous and glorious, are lost. All that remains of this vanished empire is the Crow Road.

Ancient records of Bael Turath and Arkhosia speak of it and describe it exactly as it appears to the adventurer of today: a road whose stones no frost can heave, which even buried under mudslides centuries old looks as if it was built yesterday when dug out again. It is a road to outlast the ages.

And on it the traveler will experience things that exist on no other road.

The story is that the nameless empire contained a great builder, who wished not only to build roads across the face of the mortal world, but between the planes and other realms as well. The folklore of this people-this is one of very few things known about them-held that crows and ravens had commerce with all of the realms. Therefore, after the builder surveyed his route but before he lay the first stone, he brewed a great enchantment using all of the magical might his empire’s wizards could muster… and he taught the crows how to understand human speech.

Then he learned their secrets. “I have given you a gift, crows,” he said. “Now in return you may tell me the secret of your ability to perceive and travel to all realms, whether astral or abyssal, elemental or fey.”

But the crows were crows, and would not tell. Have you ever tried to convince a crow to do anything? To this day, when you speak in the vicinity of a crow, or a raven, be careful. Say only what you would not fear to have repeated in front of your enemies.

Great grew the builder’s fury. Eventually he reasoned that if he could not get the answers from the crows while they were alive, he would learn it from what happened when they were dead. A bounty went out through the empire, and dead crows began arriving at the castle where the builder had his plans. At first they arrived a few at a time, brought by the bored children of local farmers. Then, when word spread that the builder paid the bounty he promised, crows started to arrive by the saddlebag-full, and then in sacks large enough that mules brought them to the builder’s door. He paid, and paid, and paid. Soon the crows had learned to stay away, but they had also learned why, and from that moment forward the crows were sworn enemies of the builder and of his road.

He had one more card yet to play, however. When he brought his crews out to the edge of the elves’ dark wood and dug the first stretch of the road’s bed, he laid the body of a crow under every tenth stone.

Now the crows hated the road and the builder, but the road was also a crows’ burial ground and they flocked to it because-though they might be larcenous, fickle, and cruel-crows honor their dead. The road stretched mile after mile, and every man or dwarf, halfling or elf-every mortal being that died building the road was buried under its stones. Walking it, the builder decreed, would be a voyage that paralleled the path between worlds.

Of course he was quite mad by this time, and grew madder as the road went on. The builder ordered exotic beasts of the Shadowfell and Elemental Chaos, the Feywild and the Abyss, all of the planes. He ordered them brought to the road and there he killed them and buried them beneath its freshly laid stones. And each of those deaths permeated the stones, and brought a bit of the other realms to the road.

Over it all watched the crows, since the builder had so many that he still buried one under every tenth stone.

At last the road reached its juncture with an even older road that led along the path of the Whitefall. He could have stopped there, but the builder had dead crows yet, and a few of the strangest unnameable creatures the magical hunters of other planes could bring him. He built onward, and buried his last crow under the final stone of the road, at the edge of a bluff overlooking a bend in the Whitefall. There he thought he could rest, and there he built himself a keep that would be his last building, where he could grow old looking out over the road he had built.

“So that’s the Inverted Keep, isn’t it?” Remy asked.

Lucan nodded. “That’s what the story says.”

“How did it get inverted? What happened to the builder?”

“Those are other stories,” Lucan said. “I’m tired of telling stories. Let’s ride, and let’s look out for what the crows get up to along this road.”

“Sounds like the crows are the least of our problems,” Kithri said.

“Some of them are shadowravens,” Lucan said.

Kithri nodded. “See?”

“But there are no sorrowsworn around because no great battle has ever been fought on the Crow Road. No general has ever kept an army together along its path.”

“Why would a general have wanted to come this way?” Biri-Daar wondered. “Between here and Karga Kul there is nothing.”

Lucan took a drink to wet his throat after the story. When he was done he said, “Who other than generals knows why generals do anything?”

Keverel leaned over toward Remy. “This, you see, is why none of us became soldiers.”

For the rest of the day they rode. Remy turned over in his mind the idea that Biri-Daar was a descendant of the Knights of Kul. How was it possible to know things like that? Iban Ja was a name in a story. Even the archivists of Arkhosia were unsure when he had lived, which meant they were unsure when the bridge had fallen.

What history might lie behind Keverel, or Kithri?

What, Remy wondered, might lie behind me?

He knew little about his own family. His mother Melendra had died five years before, when he was fourteen and by the laws of Avankil a man. Since then he had slept at the docks, usually on ships that had been abandoned or whose captains had died onshore. It took the Avankil authorities quite a while to track down and auction off those ships. In the meantime they served very well as a protected place to sleep for the urchin youth of the city. Remy had avoided the gangs by spending just enough time at the keep for the gang leaders not to trust him, but also to decide not to kill him… which he could have made difficult because a year after his mother died was when he had bought his first sword.

Of his father he knew nothing but stories. His mother had told him that his father was a sailor on one of the fast ships that escorted valuable cargoes on the cross-Gulf run between Furia and Saak-Opole. This route often ran afoul of pirates at the Kraken’s Gate, part of the archipelago at the mouth of the Dragondown Gulf. To hear Remy’s mother tell it, his father had fought through the pirates a dozen times and more, and had seen things in the waters beyond the Kraken’s Gate that he lacked the words to describe. Physically, she said, Remy resembled his father more and more as he grew older. He wondered what she would say now that he was grown. He wondered whether his father was alive, squinting into this same sunset from the deck of a ship in the Gulf-or dead, his bones long since sunk into the seabottom muck far away from the light, deeper than even the sahuagin will venture…

“Remy.”

He looked up into the concerned face of Lucan. “You were far away for a minute there,” Lucan said.

“History,” Remy said. “I was thinking about history.”

Lucan whistled. In the trees, crows ruffled their feathers at the sound. “They will talk to me a little because I know some of their language,” he said. “Crows don’t like it when you assume that they will learn your speech and you don’t have to learn theirs.”

“Is that right,” Remy said. He wasn’t sure whether Lucan was joking or not.

Lucan raised his arm and whistled a complicated pattern. Out of the setting sun fell a crow. It landed on his forearm and cocked its head at him. “See?” he said to Remy.

“I see you can call it,” Remy said. “I haven’t seen that it can talk.”

“Awk,” the crow said. “Talk.”

Lucan clucked at it. “Slow, slow. No need to rush.” He looked up at Remy. “It has been a very long time since they received their gift. Most of them never use it and it comes back slowly when they try.”

“Time,” the crow said.

With a wink at Remy, Lucan said, “Time, right. Plenty of time.”

“No time,” the crow said.

“Why not?” Remy asked it.

“No time to talk,” the crow said. It flapped over to Remy and landed on his shoulder. Leaning in close to his ear, it said, “Found you. They found you. Time to watch you die.”

He would learn later that some of those who had died building the Crow Road returned as spectral undead, yearning for their bodies to live again-or, failing that, to at least be buried with the ceremonies of their gods. There were undead in Avankil, of course. Bodies rose from the slack waters under the piers, or dug their way out of the rubbish heaps where murderers disposed of their victims. Ghosts haunted the lower corridors of the keep and the places near the walls where the specters of soldiers remembered invaders long since gone to their own rewards. The Crow Road, though, built on death, gave rise to undeath with every step.

They turned after the crow spoke and saw behind them the insubstantial shapes of wraiths and specters. They did not pursue; they shepherded. “We’re being walked ahead to meet something,” Paelias said. “I wonder what.”

“I’d rather not find out,” Kithri said. She rubbed at her forehead over her right eye. Remy had noticed her making that gesture frequently these past few days. He wondered if she was still suffering the effects of the ogre’s kick back in the orc lair. Lucan seemed to have recovered, but the Eye of Gruumsh’s spear point had passed only through meat; his joint and bones were unhurt, and Keverel had sewn his wounds up so well that Lucan was already complaining that the scars would be too small to impress the barmaids of Karga Kul.

The crow still sat on Remy’s shoulder. “Ever get the feeling that you had a crow on your shoulder so the enemy knows who to aim at?” Paelias said loudly.

Feathers rustled in the surrounding trees, and out of the deepening darkness came more crows, to festoon the party and the horses. “Wrong again,” croaked the crow on Remy’s shoulder. They kept a stead pace, moving forward, always forward, even though the time for camp had long since come. Remy’s eyes jittered back and forth from fatigue. He couldn’t focus on anything for long.

“Found me, you said,” he said to the crow.

“Awk,” the crow said. “Aye.”

“How come they don’t attack, then?”

“Because of us,” the crow said. Its voice grew clearer the more it was used.

“How droll,” Lucan said. “It tells us it’s time to watch us die, then says that we are not dying because of it.”

“Perhaps you have failed to attune yourself to the crow sense of humor,” said Biri-Daar. She was riding out in front of the rest of them, scouting to make sure the mass of undead behind them had not somehow raised reinforcements ahead.

“Are you suggesting that a crow has more of a sense of humor than I do?” Lucan said.

“If she wasn’t, I will,” Kithri said.

The crow on Remy’s shoulder followed this back-and-forth with cocked head. “Awk,” it said at the end.

“Really, they’re not attacking us because of you?” Remy asked it.

“Really.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“The elf, awk,” the crow said. “Speaks our language. Few Tenfingers care. Awk.”

“Who would like to apologize first?” Lucan said smugly.

“What I want to know,” Kithri said, “is why the wraiths back there are afraid of a bunch of crows.”

Paelias chuckled. “This is the Crow Road, isn’t it?”

The crows on their shoulders and on the pommels of their saddles awked.

All night they rode, until the horses’ heads drooped and their riders were slumped forward over the horses’ manes. Even some of the crows rode silently, heads tucked under one wing. Remy remembered little of that night except the occasional flutter next to his ear as his first crow passenger shifted in its sleep.

The sun rose directly ahead, bringing them out of sleep with sandy eyes and frayed nerves, not to mention bruised backsides. The crows were gone. When they looked behind them, so were the wraiths. “Well,” Paelias said. “If that’s the appetizer, I wonder what the main course will be?”

Biri-Daar yawned, showing teeth that seemed to go all the way down her throat. “That will be funny exactly until we find out.”

“Remember that the builder of this road poured more and more of his madness into it as he went, and his madness grew more and more consuming,” Keverel commented. “It could well be that the crows will not want to confront whatever comes tonight.”

“Then perhaps we should sleep during the day,” Kithri said. “As much as I hate to suggest it.”

They could all tell how much she hated to suggest it by how her eyes stayed half-lidded and her head lolled a little while she spoke.

“Not a terrible idea,” Biri-Daar pronounced after some consideration. They rode off the road and found a sheltered spot in a dell over which the branches of trees had knit into a canopy. There they staked out the horses, attended to their immediate needs, and slept.

“Awk,” said a crow. Remy awoke and saw it staring into his eye. He flinched. Then he realized that if the crow had intended harm, the harm would already have come. Shadows were deepening under the trees; in the gaps through their branches he could see both orange and blue in the sky.

“Right,” he said, sitting up. “Time to go. Thank you.”

The crow awked and flew away into the trees.

Remy went around the camp waking everyone up. Even Lucan and Paelias, who did not sleep, muttered and blinked and had a hard climb back to wakefulness from their quiet meditative state. “It’s a twilight world out here. Up here. On this road.” Paelias stretched and cracked his neck. “One can only wonder what awaits us around the next bend.”

“An unholy abomination that will catch those words and shove them down your throat, sideways,” Kithri growled.

“Oh halfling, do excuse me,” he said. “I do not mean my humor to offend little people with headaches.”

She spun, knife in hand. “Stop!” Biri-Daar commanded. She stepped between them. “Sheathe the knife, Kithri. And Paelias, if you must speak, perhaps not all of your speech could be dedicated to aggravating those who must ride with you.”

The eladrin appeared to consider this. “Perhaps,” he allowed. He swung up into the saddle and went out onto the road to await the rest of them.

Perhaps inspired by Paelias’s example, Remy found himself trying to pick a fight later that day, when they had stopped for water and Kithri started her sparring with Paelias again. Remy listened to it as long as he could, Paelias coolly provoking her and Kithri gladly being provoked to complain about the unfairness of the larger party members to her-the horses were too large, the portions of the meals poorly considered, the tasks given her were demeaning and mundane… finally Remy had had enough. He had a few things he needed to say, too. “What’s unfair is that I keep on fighting with you and keeping the enemies from your backs, and then the minute you have a chance to gather your thoughts you get suspicious again. When does the fighting count for something?” Remy was going to have trouble stopping himself, he knew. He always did once he started to let his feelings run. “And how do I know I can trust you? You keep me along because I have this box, maybe, and maybe you know what to do with it and you’re just waiting for the moment to do it and then I’m going to get a knife in the back. How do I know that’s not going to happen?”

None of his companions could answer… except Paelias. “Simplest of questions,” he said. “You don’t know. None of you do. Remy, you could be waiting to kill us all. Biri-Daar could be waiting to do something unspeakable to Remy at the correct moment. And I,” he added with a dramatic gesture, “might be scheming to do you all in. We can’t know. Shall we kill each other now, or shall we assume that we are working toward a common goal for the moment?”

No one spoke.

“Perfect,” Paelias said. “Then we should ride. It’s a long way to the Inverted Keep, and this Crow Road has us all at each other’s throats. Remember that.”

Several uneventful days passed, enlivened only by bickering. Then, one afternoon, Biri-Daar dropped back from her customary position at the front of the group. When she was next to Remy, she said, “So. I have told you part of why we must go to Karga Kul. Would you like to hear the rest?”

Looking straight ahead, Remy nodded. “Yes, I would,” he said.

Karga Kul! Where demons fear to tread…

When the Crow Road was built, Karga Kul was there. When Arkhosia and Bael Turath destroyed each other in blood and sorcery and the smoke of sacked cities, Karga Kul was there. Its scholars claim seven cities have risen on the great cliff where the Whitefall meets the sea, and seven times seven languages have been spoken in the halls of its keep, and seven times seven times seven rooms are built below the lowest level in a dungeon from whose furthest corners one can step, incredibly, up into the Underdark.

And in one of those seven times seven times seven rooms is a door that leads nowhere on the mortal plane. This door is bound in iron, its hinges ruined with acid, molten lead poured into the cracks and the magical sigils of seven civilizations inscribed into the lead.

Over all of this, forming an unbreakable barrier, is the eldritch Seal of Karga Kul.

If any man or woman knows who put the seal on that door, the story has never been told, or it has been lost over the centuries. What is known is that on the other side waits Doresain, the Exarch of the Demon Prince Orcus. For a century of centuries he has waited for that door to open. His demonic allies and underlings wait with him: the apelike barlgura, insectoid mezzodemon, avian vrock and great pincered glabrezu, six-armed marilith with the serpent’s tail. The Abyssal chamber where Doresain held his watch was lit by the infernal glare of the immolith, and the hulks of goristro muscled smaller demons out of the way along the walls.

Somewhere in the world, it was said, secret cults worshiped Orcus. The most dedicated of these cults spawned powerful death priests, anointed by Orcus himself and given power over men’s dreams. These cults work to open gateways between the Abyss and the mortal realms; their methods are assassination, infiltration, seduction… rarely do they show themselves. Karga Kul is their greatest prize, and the one they have never gained. Other armies have marched on Karga Kul, and broken on its walls. Never has the seal been broken, and never have the demons of the Abyss been unleashed to ravage the city from the inside, and, with it destroyed, spill into the mortal world.

Periodically the seal grows weak, and must be reinscribed. The quill that may inscribe the seal is kept far away, in a location known only to the Knights of Kul, the dragonborn elite given the Duty of Moidan’s Quill after the great victory at the Bridge of Iban Ja…

“That’s you, isn’t it?” Remy said.

Biri-Daar nodded. “Me, and my ancestors stretching back perhaps a hundred generations. I am given a most sacred trust.”

“We have the quill now?”

“No.” Biri-Daar looked out over the Crow Road, where shapes danced in the gloaming as the sun fell into the mountains behind them and the sky darkened through violet and toward black in the distance ahead. “Moidan’s Quill was first held by Bahamut himself. He inscribed the symbols that hold the Abyss bottled in the bowels of the dungeons below Karga Kul. Never have the dragonborn guardians of the quill failed to present it when the seal grew faint and needed reinscription. I will not be the first.”

Remy worked out in his head what he was already assuming to be the truth. “It’s in the Inverted Keep.”

“Yes,” Biri-Daar said. “It’s in the Inverted Keep.”

“How did the Inverted Keep get… inverted?” Remy asked. Also he wanted to ask what were those shapes dancing at the edge of the darkness ahead of them, but they were far enough not to worry about just yet… and in any case could be just illusions born of the road’s bizarre origins… and the story Biri-Daar told was too fascinating. Remy couldn’t imagine listening to anything else…

There was a jerk around his waist, and Remy flew off his horse and hit the ground hard. The impact jarred something loose in his shoulder, and also in his mind. He had been ensorcelled! Something…

The thing wrapped around his waist was a vine. Remy dug his heels into the earth and found his knife. He slashed at the vine until it snapped, and fell backward against the embankment of the Crow Road.

Suddenly the earth around him was alive with the vines-no, they were roots. And one of the great old trees at the edge of the road was moving. “Treant!” shouted Lucan. “A blackroot!”

Treants, those legendary guardians of the forests, were as vulnerable as other kinds of life to the undead transformations that occurred along the Crow Road. This one moved with the sound of crackling bark and the whisper of long-dead leaves that did not fall from its branches. The roots binding Remy dragged him toward it. “Behind it,” he called out as the rest of the group leaped off their horses. “There’s something behind it!”

From either side of the treant, sword wraiths appeared, their blades catching the moonlight. Remy struggled to draw his own sword but his arm was bound fast. All he could do was saw with his knife at the roots that drew him ever closer to the treant’s great fists, which would pound him into a bloody paste in the undergrowth.

If the sword wraiths didn’t kill him first.

Keverel was the first to reach him. Forbidden by his oaths to use bladed weapons, he lent his weight to Remy’s struggle against the roots, while raising his holy symbol high with one hand and calling out. “Back, spawn of the Shadowfell! By Erathis, you shall not have this boy!”

The wraiths paused and flitted smoothly away from Keverel, keeping Remy between them and the cleric. “We will have either him or what he carries, holy man,” one of them said. “Or perhaps both.”

“And perhaps we bring you along as well. The Shadowfell has delights for the mortal who denies himself worldly pleasures,” the other added. One of Lucan’s arrows passed right through it, wisps of black the only sign of its passage until it thunked into the trunk of the treant. Rumbling, the undead tree spirit took a step toward Remy.

Paelias landed next to Remy, sword drawn and ready to engage the wraiths. “You surely draw a lot of attention, youngling,” the eladrin said. His sword flicked out and was parried by one of the wraiths. “Lucan! Even the odds, mind?”

From the wraiths’ side, Lucan attacked, driving one of them into the other. Both glided out of his reach, but Paelias was watching the shadows and was ready when the first emerged from the shadowglide. His sword struck home, bringing a miserable screech from the wraith, whose return stroke caught only Paelias’s blade. Pressing his advantage, the eladrin struck again, and with a trailing scream the swordwraith vanished. Lucan awaited the other’s return from its shadowglide, looking hard for any trace of moongleam on its blade.

Biri-Daar thudded to the ground next to Keverel as the blackroot treant took another slow, implacable step forward. “I am loath to do this,” she said.

Landing next to her with flint and steel in one hand and an oil-soaked torch in the other, Kithri said, “If you let it squash Remy, it will probably go away.”

“Life is never that easy,” Biri-Daar said. She took a running step and leaped, new twin katars from Crow Fork Market reversed in her hands to use as improvised climbing axes. Below her, Kithri ignited her torch.

Lucan and Paelias backed slowly toward each other, keeping Remy and Keverel in the corner of their fields of vision. “You didn’t accidentally hit both of them?” Lucan asked.

Paelias shook his head. “Just the one. Might have killed it. Or whatever it is you do to finish a wraith.”

Then the second swordwraith appeared, all the way on the other side of Keverel, emerging from the shadows cast when Kithri lit her torch. She reared back and threw it at a knot of branches halfway up the treant’s trunk, on the side opposite where Biri-Daar slowly worked her way up to the suggestion of a face in the dead branches of its crown. It swatted at her but could not dislodge her, and the torch caught its bark on fire. Immediately the treant devoted all of its attention to putting out the flames; using the distraction, Biri-Daar reached the base of the crown, where its ears would have been if the treant had been human. Instead of ears it featured a knotted hole on either side, with a multitude of tiny branches sprouting like whiskers above and around it.

On the ground, the swordwraith’s blade flashed out to strike an unwary Kithri, who was striking flint over another torch-but with a clang, Keverel flung out his mace at the last moment, deflecting the blow. His protective blessing wavered and the swordwraith turned on him, slashing open his mail shirt and the flesh underneath.

Her torch lit, Kithri swung it around and swept it through the denser shadow of the swordwraith’s head. The flame bloomed up and down its body and its screech pierced the night, spurred to a higher pitch when a leaping Paelias landed next to the prone Keverel and dispatched it with a stroke of his sword.

All of them looked up at Biri-Daar then, as she drew a deep breath and put her beaked mouth to the blackroot treant’s ear.

She did not want to use fire. She did not want to burn the forest or destroy the spirits that lived therein. But she did very much want this blackroot treant to find death, to return to the soil that had given it life. All of that time spent with elves and rangers had made her too sensitive, no doubt-but whatever the cause, when Biri-Daar unleashed her dragonbreath into the knothole at the side of the blackroot’s head, she did so with more pity than anger.

Flames flared out through the great rotting holes of its eyes and mouth, roaring along with the agonized roar the blackroot made. Blindly it grasped at Biri-Daar, found her, flung her away into the trees-but too late, as the flames caught the dead leaves of its crown and exploded into a great mushroom of fire. The roots holding Remy spasmed, twisted, and fell limp. Kithri sawed them away from his legs with a knife. “Lucan! Paelias! Find Biri-Daar!” she yelled over the sound of the flames.

In the last moments of its undeath, the blackroot staggered back toward the forest where its roots had first found sustenance. Then, Remy saw, it caught itself, jerking back from the edge of the forest in a shower of embers. Turning, losing its balance as the life burned out of its long-dead heartwood, the blackroot took one great step-over him, over the moaning Keverel, over Kithri-onto the Crow Road. And when it had gotten both feet on the road, it fell, its roots and branches dying by inches, curling and blackening as the flames found every inch of what centuries before had been one of the noblest beings of the world.

“Did you see that?” Lucan said wonderingly. “It moved out of the trees.”

Kneeling over Keverel, Kithri said, “Lucan, don’t be an idiot. It was undead. It didn’t know where it was going.”

“You believe what you believe,” Lucan said. He looked over at Paelias, whose chiseled face bore the same expression of disbelief as his own. Both of them looked at Remy.

“I think I saw it too,” Remy said. “It stopped and turned around, didn’t it?”

“Go find Biri-Daar!” Kithri screamed. “Go!”

They went, not wanting to argue, even though they were fairly sure that Biri-Daar was all right. She had survived far worse than a short flight through tree branches.

And they were very sure that they had seen that night something that none of them might ever see again: an undead creature remembering, at the moment of its death, something of its long-gone living self.

Neither Lucan nor Paelias said anything about this as Biri-Daar limped out of the darkness before they had gotten a hundred paces away from the road. They fell into step with her, waiting to see if she needed help. She waved them away. “Sore is all,” she said. “I am tempted to believe that the other trees… treants, perhaps, but perhaps just trees… I am tempted to believe that they looked after me a little.”

“I believe it,” Lucan said. “After what I saw that blackroot do, I can believe anything.”

That night they were able to sleep a little, in the lee of a grassy knoll far enough from the road that the crows wouldn’t follow them all the way. “How much farther are we on this road?” Paelias asked. “Which of you have traveled it all the way?”

“All the way? None of us,” Lucan said. “I have been on part of it.”

“I too. As far as the Crow’s Foot at the Tomb Fork,” Biri-Daar said.

Paelias looked around. “Just the two of you,” he said. “And neither as far as this Inverted Keep. Interesting. Well, I’ll take the first watch and perhaps in the morning one of the crows will bring us a map.”

In the morning, while they brewed tea and toasted bread, Remy said, “Would the crows do that? I mean guide us.” Keverel was slicing jerked meat. He paused and looked at Lucan.

“Interesting,” he said. “Would they?”

Lucan chuckled. “My guess is that I have no idea. I’ll give it a try.”

They waited as Lucan walked closer to the road and whistled out to the crows. Two of them flapped down into a dead tree closer to him. Remy watched as the crows bobbed their heads at Lucan. He pointed down the road, made a circular motion in the direction of the sun. After a few minutes, the crows flew back to their stations at the tops of the nearest trees. Lucan walked back toward the camp and the crows began to caw.

“They’re just sentries,” he said. “They’re descended, or say they are, from the crows buried along this part of the road, which according to them originally came from a clan that lived on the edge of the elves’ forest near the Gorge of Noon. Who knows whether it’s true.

“But they also said that they thought it was five more days to the Crow’s Foot, and a day after that to the Inverted Keep. I’m not sure how clear their ideas are about how far we can go in a day.”

“Not far enough,” Kithri sighed. “Is there water on the way?”

“Odd you should mention that. The crows said that the last day or so of the trek would be through a swamp.” Lucan squatted by the fire and poured tea. “They don’t like the swamp. They wouldn’t say why, but it was clear they didn’t like the swamp at all.”

“Well, I love swamps,” Paelias said brightly.

Keverel snorted. “Gods,” Kithri said. “You made the cleric laugh. Either this will be a great day or we will all die.”

Saddled up and back on the road, they watched the crows watch them for that day and the next. The Crow Road leveled out and traversed a broad landscape of naked granite and clear water, punctuated occasionally by twisted pines festooned with observant crows. “So,” Remy said when they had ridden the entire day without incident. “I’m starting to feel unusual because nothing has happened.”

“You mean nobody besieging us because they want your box?” Kithri said.

“Or undead spirits wanting to drag us down below the stones, to transform us into ghouls and wights.” Keverel smiled thinly. There had been too much of that in the reality of their days for it to carry much humor.

“When we get to the Inverted Keep, what are we going to find?” Remy asked.

“I don’t know.” Biri-Daar looked at the clouds gathering to the northeast. “I’ve never seen it except from the other side of the Whitefall. And I have never spoken to anyone who has been in the Keep and returned.”

“What do you know?” Paelias. “Every time someone asks you something, O dragonborn leader, you tell us what you don’t know.”

“What do I know?” Biri-Daar repeated. “I know that the Inverted Keep hangs hundreds of feet in the air over the Whitefall, and that the way into it involves a way underground through the tomb of the Road-builder. I know that he transformed himself in some way, and presides over the Keep as he has done for centuries. I know that…” She faltered.

They rode in silence until she was ready to speak again.

“I know that there is a dragonborn there. One of my ancestors,” Biri-Daar said quietly. “I know that one of the Guardians of the Quill is there. That…” Again she trailed off and again she mastered herself. “That will not be so once we have come and gone.”

None of them knew what to say. Remy watched the dragonborn who had led them this far, and he understood more about how and why she did what she did.

“I will find Moidan’s Quill, and bring it out, and we will take the quill to Karga Kul,” Biri-Daar said. She said it to the sky but meant them to hear it. “The Mage Trust of Karga Kul will use the quill to reinscribe the seal and replenish its power. There are too few points of light in the world,” Biri-Daar went on, and her voice broke. “Karga Kul is one of them. It is also my home though I have not been there in many years. I would not have it drown in the chaos of the Abyss.”

If someone had asked him to list five things he thought he would never see, Remy would have put seeing a dragonborn cry high on the list. And he would have put tears from Biri-Daar at the top of any list. The paladin cried silently and without motion, riding forward with no change in her pace or expression. “It occurs to me,” Lucan said, “that if all of us chose to bear the sins of our ancestors, we would surely be suicides.”

“I fear that I can disagree. My ancestors have pledged themselves to Erathis for as long as there are records in Toradan,” Keverel said.

“Surely we don’t have to remind the good cleric that holy men sin,” Kithri said. “If we do have to remind him, I know some songs.”

“I don’t think so,” Keverel said, but once Kithri got started with a song, there was no stopping her.

Here I am, Remy thought periodically over the next few days of riding. I am with a group of strangers on a quest that means little to me. Why did they insist I come with them? Why didn’t they leave me at the market?

The box that had caused all the trouble was a foot long, give or take, and perhaps three inches wide and two deep. Its clasp was pewter and the seam between its lid and the box was invisible-unless magical attention was directed at it. The seam had glowed right along with the sigils on its lid when Iriani had first investigated the box. Remy wondered again what would happen if he opened it. It had been some time since anyone or anything had tried to take it from him.

What did Philomen want? Was Biri-Daar right that the vizier was untrustworthy, that he had sent Remy out into the wastes to die? Biri-Daar’s theory was that Philomen needed the object Remy carried to disappear because other forces in Avankil wanted it. Or that Remy was never intended to survive the trip to Toradan, and that after his death some agent of the vizier’s would have found his body and recovered the box.

No one in the group seemed to have any patience for the idea that Remy had been intended to deliver the box to Toradan.

“Who were you supposed to speak to there?” Biri-Daar asked on their fourth day. The Crow Road switchbacked down a steep slope for as far as they could see in front of them before disappearing into what looked like a lowland jungle. They weren’t in the lowlands yet, but before they got to the Whitefall there would be a good deal of marsh to traverse. Biri-Daar remembered that much of her previous passage along the road.

“I was given a place,” Remy said. “The vizier told me that when I arrived at Toradan, I should find the Monastery of the Cliff and speak to the abbot. But he never told me the abbot’s name.”

“The Monastery of the Cliff,” Biri-Daar echoed. “What would those monks want with a package from the vizier of Avankil?” She clucked her tongue, something that Remy had learned meant she was mulling a problem with no obvious solution. “You were sent out into the desert to die, Remy,” she said shortly. “That is clear to you now, isn’t it?”

“I know it’s clear to you,” Remy said. “That’s why I came along. But I still don’t understand… I don’t know anything. What does any of this Karga Kul business have to do with me?”

“The Abyss pursues you. And demons threaten Karga Kul,” Biri-Daar said quietly. “Do you want to stake your life on that being a coincidence? I would sooner cut my own throat than deliver an unknown, magically guarded item to the monks on the cliff.”

“Why?”

“It has been long years since those monks kept their holy orders,” Biri-Daar said.

They rode in silence for some time after that. Eventually Remy worked up his nerve and said, “Biri-Daar. This is a personal quest for you.”

The dragonborn nodded.

“Almost an obsession.”

Biri-Daar made no response.

“Perhaps your obsession is making it seem like my errand has something to do with your quest,” Remy said. “I don’t see it.”

“Would you like to turn around and go home now, Remy?” Biri-Daar asked.

Yes, Remy wanted to say. I would like to turn around and go home and forget that any of this ever happened…

Except that wasn’t true. All his life he had dreamed of adventure. He had looked at the ships docked in Quayside and imagined going all the places they had gone… all the places his father had gone. Remy had insatiably devoured every tale of heroism and magic, of questing and exploration, that he could find. He had learned to read solely so he could follow the stories told in the one book his mother had-her great-uncle’s memoirs about his time at sea in the waters far beyond the Dragondown Coast, waters beset with floating ice or great mats of living vines that grew up from the depths to ensnare and destroy unwary mariners…

He had memorized the names of every city and town on the coast and determined to visit each and every one, swearing to himself that he would make his name in the world and leave behind stories that other men would write.

“No,” he said to Biri-Daar. “I don’t want to go home.”

“Wise,” said the paladin.

“We both know I can’t go home anyway. It’s not wise to accept that which cannot be changed.”

“Perhaps not,” Biri-Daar said. “But it is certainly unwise not to. You are good company, Remy. And you have the makings of a fine warrior, it seems to me. But you are with us because… I must be honest here. You are with us because I trust nothing that has any taint of the vizier,” Biri-Daar said. “And that includes you.”

The Crow Road wound like a snake through swamp and jungle after descending along the flanks of the last northeastern range of the Draco Serrata. The earth itself turned first to mud and then seemingly to a slippery tangle of root and rotten leaf, as if they walked on a pad of floating plant matter under which there was nothing but dark water all the way to the center of the earth. That was what it felt like when the skies lowered, and through the midday semidarkness they tried to keep to the road, feeling its algae-slicked stones under their feet until inevitably they stepped off and began to slide into the depthless muck. Biri-Daar nearly roped them all together, but at the last minute thought better of it; the threat was a little too real that they might all be reeled downward like a stringer of fish.

“Hey, Lucan, what do the crows have to say?” Kithri asked on their second day out of the mountains. The entire world was the drip, drip of water in the overhanging trees and the softly terrifying sounds of creatures unseen moving in the shadows.

“These are the Raven Queen’s watchers here,” Lucan said, looking up into the tangled canopy. Remy couldn’t even see the birds he was seeing, and even if he could have seen them, he wasn’t entirely sure about the differences between crows and ravens. “They are less willing to speak to me. The Queen, they think, is unhappy with our errand.”

“Why would that old bitch care about what we do?” Paelias spat off the road into still black water. “She’ll get her share of dead whether we ever see Karga Kul or not.”

“The Raven Queen has never concerned herself with getting enough,” Biri-Daar said. “For her, the only enough is everything. Every life we save is an affront to her.”

“Then let’s make sure we do enough killing to keep her happy before we start saving all those lives,” Kithri said, so brightly her voice was almost a chirp.

“The ravens say one thing,” Lucan added. “Ahead, the dead things buried under the road are not always dead.” He paused, listening. “And the live things are in commerce with the dead.”

Keverel, in a humorless mood, made a warding gesture. “Must the crows speak in riddles?”

The ravens cawed back and forth to each other. “Ravens speak the way ravens speak,” Lucan said with a shrug. “You don’t have to listen. They also said that in another mile or so, we were going to have to learn to swim. Then they laughed.”

In another mile or so, the Crow Road subsided below still black water. It was still visible, as a ribbon of open water winding between impenetrable walls of jungle swamp on either side, but as far ahead as they could see it did not re-emerge from the water. The horses stopped at the water and would not go forward no matter how hard they were spurred or dragged. They dug in their hooves, eyes wild and rolling, until the party gave up and stood apart from their mounts at the water’s edge.

“So the crows tell jokes as well as riddles,” Keverel said.

“Ravens,” Lucan corrected him again. “But the same is true of crows.”

They stood watching each other and looking out over the water for a long moment. “Does anyone know how to charm a horse?” Paelias asked. No one laughed.

“The horses know better,” Lucan said. “Too bad we don’t.”

“The only way is forward,” Biri-Daar said. “If the horses will not go, we will go without them. Salvage as much of your gear as you can.”

They loaded themselves with what they could carry, then drew lots to see who would go out into the water first. Paelias won, or lost. “Cleric,” he said. “Bless me.”

Keverel did, calling the power of Erathis to protect the eladrin. “Now we will find out what power Erathis has,” Paelias said, and he took a step into the water. It was ankle deep. He took another. “I can still feel the road,” he said. He stepped farther out. After ten paces he was knee-deep. After ten paces more, still knee-deep.

“All right,” Biri-Daar said. “Anything that can’t get wet, stow it high. We walk until we have to swim, and then we’ll see what happens.”

“Easy for you to say,” Kithri said. But she stepped into the water right after Paelias, and swallowed her pride when she needed to be lifted onto Biri-Daar’s shoulders as the water grew slowly but inexorably deeper.

They slogged through for the rest of the day, usually in knee- to thigh-deep water but every so often holding swords and packs over their heads as they negotiated stretches where the water deepened to their necks. Once they had to swim for a stretch. All of them expected at any moment to be snatched under the water by something formless and horrible. Keverel, Biri-Daar, and Paelias kept up a steady stream of whispered and gestured charms, to disclose the presence of malevolent creatures and to ward them away when and if their presence was discovered. It was only a matter of time. They knew it was only a matter of time.

In late afternoon shadows, the water held at thigh level. “Biri-Daar,” Keverel said. “We can’t do this all night. We’re going to need to camp. It’ll be dark soon and I don’t relish trying to build a treehouse in the dark with the local wildlife coming out to greet us.”

Biri-Daar stopped. “Agreed,” she said after a look around. “Lucan. What’s your feeling about the trees around here?”

“Most of them are dead. There are a few blackroots farther back off the road,” Lucan said. “If we keep fires burning, I don’t think they’ll come too close, but none of these trees are going to like fire very much. That means they don’t like you very much, Biri-Daar. But if one of them is going to let us stay, it will be one of these old willows. They soak up so much water that you can’t hardly burn them if you drop them into a volcano.” With a wink, he added, “And they’re just a bit more friendly than most of the trees you’ll find back here.”

“Do they talk?” Remy asked.

“Not exactly,” Lucan said. “But I can tell what they feel. Some of them remember this marsh before the Crow Road was built. They don’t like what it has become. One of those will let us hammock for the night.”

“Well, which one? Let’s find it,” Kithri said. Her usually invulnerable good cheer had been much tested by the amount of carrying and assistance she’d needed during the day. Pride was a difficult thing.

Lucan pointed ahead of them and to the left. “See the willow there? It’s willing.”

They sloshed toward it, keeping on the road until the last minute, when they had to leave the relatively stable footing of the stones for the treacherous swamp bottom. It was twenty yards perhaps to the long-hanging branches of the willow. As they made their way forward, the water started to boil around them, and Remy knew that the feeling he’d had all day-the feeling of being observed, awaited, hunted-had been justified.

They came out of the water all at once, yuan-ti malisons in a double circle around them, eyes gleaming black. “I should have known we wouldn’t get through a place like this without finding them,” Keverel said grimly. “Wherever there is poisoned water and dark magic, there will be yuan-ti.”

They started moving closer together, deciding whether to move for the safety of the tree or open space of the sunken roadbed. “Something in the trees, there,” Lucan said.

Keverel glanced over where Lucan had pointed. “Abomination,” he said. They could see its coils draped over a low branch of a live oak. Its only humanoid features were four arms and a head that had aspects of both man and snake.

Before he got his shield up, a spear hit Remy square in the pit of the stomach. Without his mail coat it would have punched straight through his vitals and he would have died before he could count to fifty. With his mail coat, the impact still punched the wind from Remy’s lungs and the strength from his legs. He went down, gasping in water and choking it back out. Hands caught one arm and in his hair, hauling him back to his feet. “Stay up!” Keverel shouted in his ear. Remy clutched at the cleric, gathering his balance. Another spear rang off Keverel’s shield.

“To me! The willow!” Biri-Daar’s voice rose over the sounds of the battle, and twining through it all, the rattle and hiss of the yuan-ti. It was a sound nearly like speech, so that Remy’s mind looked for words in it, but never quite found them. Hypnotic and dangerous to hear, the hiss of the yuan-ti was every bit as dangerous as the poison in their fangs or the blades in their clawed hands.

Paelias sent a blast of magical energy spreading out across the surface of the water, singeing the yuan-ti and gathering them a moment to get into a defensive position. More spears arced in, but they had shields ready. Lucan even flicked one aside with his sword. Above them, the incanter whispered, its almost-words buzzing in their heads, distracting them, keeping them off balance. Remy started to get his breath back, but something was wrong and he couldn’t tell what.

Lucan looked around as they knit themselves into a circle. Blades out, backs in. “Where’s Keverel?” he shouted.

Of the cleric there was no sign.

Paelias swore and dived underwater before any of them could stop him… and with a whistle and hiss, the incanter in the tree uncoiled and dropped down, disappearing with barely a ripple after him. A moment later the water exploded into foam near the base of the tree. Simultaneously the rest of the yuan-ti reappeared, closing in with spears and nets. Kithri, already neck-deep, said, “Try not to step on me.”

“What?” Remy said.

Without repeating herself, the halfling took a deep breath and ducked under.

That left Lucan, Biri-Daar, and Remy. Three swords against two dozen yuan-ti. “We fight,” Biri-Daar said. “They cannot gain what you have, Remy. If we must kill ten of them for each of us, or twenty, then that is what we must do.”

One of the yuan-ti, more aggressive than the rest, probed with its spear. Biri-Daar caught the barbed spearhead in one of the curls of her blade and jerked the malison off balance, close enough that both Remy and Lucan ran it through without having to take more than a step.

The others, seizing the opportunity, surged forward-but at that moment Keverel stood up out of the water, blood running from claw marks across his face and neck. In the crook of his arm dangled the lifeless form of the yuan-ti incanter. “There!” he cried, and brought his mace down on the incanter’s head. The blow forced one of its eyes out to dangle on the surface of the water. A concerted hissing whistle arose from the rest of the yuan-ti.

Paelias appeared, and he and Keverel backed toward the circle. “Where’s the halfling?” Keverel asked. He let the incanter’s body go. It sank out of sight.

“She went looking for you,” Remy said. He was still seeing double sometimes, and feeling weak in his hands and knees. “Too long ago.”

As if they were actors in a play, two of the yuan-ti between the circle of warriors and the inviting branches of the willow threw back their heads with a gargling hiss and sank into the water. Behind them, Kithri appeared, scampering up the hanging willow branches. Nearby yuan-ti stabbed their spears at her, but she quickly moved higher, out of reach. “Let’s go!” she cried. “How much of a path do you need?”

“Now you know,” Remy said.

Keeping the circle, they forced their way through a thicket of spearpoints, catching and killing any yuan-ti that drew too close, making a tortoiseshell of their shields when the yuan-ti drew back their arms to throw spears instead of thrust them. Little by little, they fought their way toward the safe haven of the tree.

“Where did you go?” Remy asked Keverel.

“Slipped,” the cleric said. “Paelias found me at the same time the incanter did. I couldn’t see, but they could. I think it bit him. Have to see to him when this is over.”

“See that you do see to me, holy man,” Paelias said. As he spoke he slowed the advance of the yuan-ti with a sheet of ice across the water. They started in breaking it apart with the butts of their spears.

It didn’t look like any of them were going to be seeing to anything when the yuan-ti were through. There were too many of them, even without the incanter. And there was nowhere to stand. Still they fought their way to the trunk of the willow and got their backs to it as the yuan-ti closed in. Kithri picked some of them off with throwing knives that snapped out of her hands faster than any of them could see in the failing light, but more arose from the water… and still more were coming through the jungle canopy.

Remy had been afraid but now was not. If he was going to die, he was going to die among comrades who had plucked him from the wastes and begun to teach him what it was to be a man, to fight for something worth fighting for. He would fight until he could fight no longer… as he had the thought he struck down into the water to his right, burying the point of his sword in the open mouth of a malison poised to strike at his thigh.

“Up into the tree,” Biri-Daar ordered. Lucan caught a branch and swung himself up, taking a glancing slash across his leg and returning with a blow that struck out one of the yuan-ti’s slitted eyes.

A net sailed from the shadows, its weights clattering against the willow trunk and its weave tangling the sword arms of Biri-Daar and Lucan straddling the tree branch above her. More nets spun in to catch at Paelias’s limbs and web the spaces between the branches and the water. Remy cut at them, but they were coming in faster than he could handle them.

Help arrived then, from a most unexpected quarter; a blizzard of short arrows swept across the yuan-ti from an angle back in the direction of the sunken road. Whistles echoed across the water as small shapes appeared in the trees, coming from nowhere to ambush the yuan-ti. Their closing circle suddenly became a sandwiched line. Remy worked furiously to free Biri-Daar and Paelias from the net cords that tangled them. Lucan was already free. From higher in the tree, Kithri shocked them all by whistling just as their shadowy rescuers had.

“Halflings!” Kithri cried out. “The Whitefall halflings!”

They struck out from the trunk of the tree, forcing the yuan-ti back into the teeth of the halflings’ barrage. Remy flinched as the arrows of the unseen halfling archers hissed by uncomfortably close. He sunk lower in the water-and saw that the sigils on the package from Philomen were glowing brightly through its wrappings. Anything under the water could see it.

And something did. Erupting from the swamp-bottom muck, two undead corruptions reached out for him. Their mouths fell open, spilling water and weeds and teeth. The sound they made seemed intended to be words but Remy could not parse them. He struck at one, his sword slowed at first by the water; still the blow landed and the creature’s arm snapped off just above the elbow with a crack of rotten bone. He swung around, staggering against invisible roots, and barely deflected a swiping claw. With a shock of recognition he realized what he was fighting, and just as he did Biri-Daar appeared, the righteous fires from her mouth incinerating one of the undead and her sword hacking the other back down into the muck from which it had come. “Apostate,” she said, the words smoking in the dusk. “Heretic.”

Dragonborn. They had once been dragonborn.

The yuan-ti were gone, driven back into the vine-draped darkness by the hail of halfling arrows. The halflings themselves were suddenly appearing everywhere, calling out to Kithri in a riverboat pidgin that Remy recognized but did not understand. The burning undead floated for a moment, the stinking water extinguishing the flames in puffs of loathsome steam. As it sank, Biri-Daar watched and spoke softly for only Remy to hear. “The builder of this road has much to answer for,” she said.

Their halfling rescuers were a river tribe that raided into the Lightless Marsh whenever the mood took them, it seemed. Few of them spoke a Common that Remy could understand, and the only one among the travelers who could understand their river pidgin was, of course, Kithri-and even she laughed at their odd colloquialisms. “We Blackfall halflings are a very different bunch,” she chuckled. “Intermarriage must bring some raucous festivals.”

“What are they doing this far into the marshes?” Keverel asked. “There’s nothing back here but abomination.”

“According to them, abomination and loot go together like bread and cheese,” Kithri said. She was about to go on when the leader of the halflings spoke up in Common.

“The road is as much waterway here as anything else,” the halfling said, pointing back at the gap in the trees where the submerged Crow Road led on toward Tomb Fork. “So here we are. Would you prefer to dispute further, or shall we make our exit?”

“Exit sounds good to me,” Lucan said. “This is no forest. This is a cesspit.”

The halflings had stowed their boat in the lee of a dying cypress whose girth it would have taken six men linking arms to encircle. The boat was flat-bottomed and broad-beamed, designed to take weight over distance on quiet water. Currently it was empty of cargo save for what looked like a short pyramidal stack of muddy coffins. Remy asked if that was what they were, but everyone he asked pretended not to speak Common. The boat accepted the five adventurers’ weight with no trouble and its pilot Vokoun, at a bow tiller, waved at a half-dozen polers to get them moving.

“There are more yuan-ti than there used to be around here,” the pilot said as they poled their way through the swamp. Along the sides of the raft, archers stayed at the ready. Ahead, there was light-a patch of sky. Remy felt a weight leave his chest as he saw it. They had been closer than he’d thought; how terrible it would have been to die so near the goal… or the next stage in the goal, at any rate. “We run the tributaries all along here,” Vokoun went on, “and dip into the swamps as we hear about this or that ruin that might be worth a look. Usually whatever we find isn’t worth the fight to get it, especially the closer you get to the road. But today our shaman had dreams about the roadside near the fork, so we decided to come and see what might need our attention.” He turned to the group and winked. “Turned out to be you. Should have known you had a halfling with you. That’s probably what the shaman was really dreaming about. Half the time he’s chewed so much kaat that he can’t interpret his own mind.”

Vokoun paused for breath and Biri-Daar jumped in before he could get started again. “Can you take us as far as Iskar’s Landing?”

“Sure, that’s where we’re going anyway. From here, not much choice.” Vokoun spat overboard. Remy noted from the color that he was a bit of a kaat chewer himself. “But what do you want to go there for, if you’re headed for Karga Kul? We can get you there. For a halfling cousin-even a Blackfall cousin-it’s the least we could do.”

“We are in your debt,” Keverel said formally.

Vokoun laughed. “You sure are. But it’s a debt we’ll never collect, so why worry about it?” He spat again and looked over his shoulder at the sleeping Kithri. “She’s not doing well? She’s hurt?”

“She was badly hurt by an ogre some time back,” Keverel said. “She is healing, but more slowly than I would like. It’s the air, the bad spirits… for all I know, it’s the crows. Whatever it is, she’s not doing as well as I would have hoped. But she is tougher than the rest of us; she’ll come through.”

Vokoun clucked in his throat and said something in the river pidgin to the archers. Each of them made a similar cluck and a quick gesture over the sleeping Kithri. Biri-Daar and Keverel exchanged a glance. Remy watched, wondering if Keverel would add an Erathian blessing. When he did not, Remy then wondered whether it was because he didn’t want to offend their hosts or because he believed that, among halflings, the halflings’ beliefs carried more power. Remy knew little of gods. He had heard their names, and his oaths, when he swore them, were to Pelor, but that was because his mother had done the same. To devote one’s life to the service of a god… it was not the life Remy would choose.

And yet he would choose-was choosing, had chosen-a life of adventure, and so had Biri-Daar and Keverel. So perhaps a life lived for a god was not such a bad life after all. Remy was thinking of that when he fell asleep to the whoosh of the poles and the slap of water against the front of the halflings’ flat-bottomed boat.

In the morning, sun beat down on Iskar’s Landing and Vokoun’s band of river traders-or river raiders, if there was a difference-was gone. There the second terminus of the Crow Road-the Southern Fork-wound down through a cut in the highlands to a flat place at a sweeping bend in the Whitefall. The landing itself was a collection of docks and a rope-drawn ferry across to the Karga Trace, which rose through the Whitefall Highlands and led after fifty leagues to Karga Kul itself. River traffic from upstream stopped there during times of year when flooding out of the Lightless Marsh made the Whitefall too dangerous to sail; during those times, an impromptu town arose, loud with gambling, whoring, and the rest of the activities bored travelers get up to when their journeys are interrupted for weeks on end. There had been no rains in the past month, however, and the Whitefall ran easy there, deep and green in the shadowed overhang of the bluffs along its north bank.

Remy had dim memories of arriving the night before, stumbling off the halflings’ boat where it beached on the bank of a Whitefall tributary stream that ran into the main river a hundred yards upstream of the landing. He had stripped off his wet clothes and wrapped himself in a slightly less wet blanket and fallen straight back to sleep near a campfire on the riverbank.

“They got out of here early,” Remy said to Lucan. Someone had strung the wet clothes near the fire to dry.

“That they did,” Lucan answered. “But you also slept in. You can thank our cleric for your dry clothes. What a mother hen he is sometimes.”

Remy got dressed, looking around. Keverel was nowhere in sight.

“Before they left,” Lucan went on, “the halflings offered us a ride the rest of the way down the river if we make it out of the Keep.”

The Keep, Remy thought. He looked upriver, half expecting to see it. Lucan saw what he was doing. “We’re not that close,” he said. “We’ll have to head back up the Southern Fork to the main road and then to the Road-builder’s Tomb. According to Vokoun, the road isn’t underwater after the Crow’s Foot, and the local beasties are fairly tame because they’re scared of whatever’s in the tomb. Sounds good to me.”

“Sure,” Remy said. “Except the tomb part.”

“There’s where you’re wrong.” Lucan pulled a mug out of the ashes near the fire and tested the liquid in it with a fingertip. Satisfied, he took a sip. “Tombs mean plunder, young Remy. And even our paladin won’t object to us helping ourselves to whatever we find in this tomb. Not after the undead dragonborn the two of you saw back there.”

“She told you about that?”

“Why wouldn’t she? Biri-Daar’s proud, but she’s not one to hide things from us. You could live your whole life and not be part of a band whose leader cared more for your life than she does.” Lucan drank again, then sneezed. “She’s not much fun, but she’s a leader even I can trust. And I don’t trust leaders.”

Keverel and Paelias came up from the riverbank, where they had been trading travelers’ tales with the others passing through the landing. “The word is out that something got away from Avankil that wasn’t supposed to,” Paelias said quietly. None of them looked at Remy. “There are bounties. Whatever it is we’re doing with Remy’s package, we should do it quick or we’re going to have demons like orcs have lice.”

“And we need to get moving out of here now,” Keverel said. “It won’t be long before some of the more unsavory characters down there figure out that maybe we might be carrying what we’re asking about.”

Paelias looked pale and shaky, as if he had just finished vomiting. “Believe I should have something to eat,” he said. “But I don’t much feel like it.”

Keverel took his arm and pulled his sleeve back to reveal a bandage. Pulling the bandage back, he revealed a yuan-ti bite mark, four punctures that formed an almost perfect square on the eladrin’s forearm. “The poison’s not going to kill you. I made sure of that. But you are going to feel a bit under the weather for a day or so yet,” Keverel said.

“Wonderful news,” Paelias said. Then he bent over, Keverel still holding one arm, and threw up at his own feet.

Biri-Daar and Kithri approached from the other side. “We leave now,” Biri-Daar said. “Much of the morning is gone and we’re not going to want to spend a night anywhere near the tomb. That means we need to get to the Crow’s Foot in the Crow Road today and find a defensible place to make camp. Paelias, can you do it?”

“The real question is, does he want to do it?” Kithri asked. “Thought you were just riding along with us for a while.”

“A little poison isn’t going to stop me going into a tomb full of horrible monstrosities with my new companions,” Paelias said. Then he threw up again.

Kithri’s skepticism notwithstanding, Remy realized that at some point Paelias had become one of the group. No one had said anything about it, and he couldn’t tell exactly when it might have happened, but he was one of them, with the same mission.

They broke camp quickly. Remy wanted to ask Biri-Daar why the sigils on the box had glowed so brightly. Had someone put a charm on it, to call attention to it when certain kinds of creatures were near? Was it sensitive to the presence of the undead?

Or was something within it calling out to the undead? Or to the yuan-ti?

Remy had many more questions than answers. But he wasn’t going to be able to ask many of them that day, not with the pace they were going to have to set if they wanted to make the Crow’s Foot with enough light to set a fire and call the watches before dark.

They made it, just. The sun was low, touching the mountaintops, when they came over a crest on the Southern Fork and saw the Crow’s Foot ahead of them. The Tomb Fork led straight away to the east, along high ground. The tomb itself was obscured by the undulations of low hills, but above and beyond it they saw their destination, and each of them regarded it in silence for a moment, awed by the powerful sorceries that had made it possible.

High over the Whitefall, its towers burning in the sunset over the Draco Serrata, hung the Inverted Keep. “I fear what we will find within,” Biri-Daar breathed. Remy asked her why, but she would not answer. They camped in silence, and in the morning entered the tomb of the mad sorcerer and self-proclaimed king who had built the Crow Road.