The seal of Karga Kul

BOOK IV

The next day as they broke camp, Remy couldn’t keep the questions out of his mouth any longer. He walked up to Biri-Daar and asked, “Did those… you know… Did they rise because of me? Because of what I’m carrying?”

She had been working a whetstone through the complicated curls on the back side of her blade. Without stopping, she said, “Perhaps.”

He waited. When she didn’t go on, he prompted her. “Should we open it? Should we know what we’re getting into if we go into a tomb? If this is going to raise undead, we’ll likely find our share of them in a tomb, won’t we?”

“We likely will,” Biri-Daar said. She paused in her sharpening and added, “But we have committed to a course. We are taking you to Karga Kul and the Mage Trust. They will know what to do. And if they do not, then I have no hope of figuring it out here. So it’s best not to think of it.”

Remy would have pushed the conversation further, but Biri-Daar stood. “Time to get moving.”

The Road-builder’s Tomb was ringed by the last paving stones of the Crow Road, at the terminus of the grand and terrible project begun somewhere near the Gorge of Noon a thousand years and more before Remy stepped onto those stones and said, “So. We have to go down to go up?”

“Yes,” Paelias said. “And then apparently up will be down.”

In the center of the keyhole created by the turnaround at the end of the Crow Road lay the open entrance to the Road-builder’s Tomb. “The story goes that he couldn’t stand the idea that the road could end,” Paelias said. “Once, I believe, there was a keyhole at the other end as well. Some say it was destroyed in the war between Arkhosia and Bael Turath. Others say it was never there at all.”

“I heard that the dragonborn of Karga Kul pulled up those stones and carried them off for their clan lair in Toradan!”

They turned as one. The speaker, standing on the far end of the ridge where they had made their camp, leaned on a tall shield, his face split in a broad grin. He was tall and broad, heavily built, his skin the color of old brick. His horns curled back from his forehead, carved with symbols of clan and god. “A tiefling,” Kithri said. “How about that?”

Biri-Daar took a step forward. “You provoke me, tiefling?” she asked.

“I jest, O mighty dragonborn, Biri-Daar, paladin of Bahamut.” The tiefling approached and dipped his head in formal greeting. “I am Obek of Saak-Opole. My ancestors and yours, dragonborn, did battle on the Bridge of Iban Ja. Now, though, events conspire to make us allies.”

“Do they?” Biri-Daar looked back at the rest of them. “What say you?”

“I am curious how a tiefling appears to bait our resident dragonborn just when we’re about to go into a tomb that is, according to legend, heaped to the ceiling with treasures beyond imagining,” Lucan said. “If this is a strategy, I cannot fathom its goal. Not to mention my curiosity as to how you know her name.”

“The goal is simple,” said Obek of Saak-Opole. “Word has spread on the river of a certain something headed to a certain place. You can always use another sword. I can use a chance to get back to Karga Kul and settle an old score there.”

“You don’t need us for that,” Keverel said.

“No, I need her.” Obek pointed at Biri-Daar. “She is known in Karga Kul, and I sought her specifically. Without her, the Mage Trust will strike me down as soon as I am within sight of the gate. With her, I at least have a chance to enter the city. That is all I ask.”

“And what do you offer?” Biri-Daar asked.

Obek drew his sword. “This. You’re going to need it.”

“You’re a fool,” Paelias said, and burst out laughing. “I thought I was the only one.”

Moving closer, Obek said, “You and I have nothing in common, eladrin. You’re a freebooter. I would sacrifice my life to get back inside Karga Kul. If the only way to do it is by going through that tomb and that keep…” He spread his arms. “No one day is a better day to die than any other.”

Biri-Daar walked up to the tiefling. “In one hour we are entering the Road-builder’s Tomb. You will not enter with us.”

On schedule, in an hour, they began the entry of the tomb. From the rise, Obek watched but made no move to follow.

The Road-builder’s Tomb began with a broad flagstone plaza, each stone carved with a different rune. “Once I read that these stones are a code, and that whoever solved it would bring the Road-builder back to life,” Keverel said.

“I’ve heard that he brought himself back to life,” Lucan said.

Kithri looked at each of them in turn. “Any other stories?”

“I heard that he takes the guise of a tiefling and tries to come along with anyone stupid enough to want to enter his tomb,” Paelias said. They all looked at him. “Why not bring him along?”

“Because, idiot,” Lucan said. “He could as easily be coming after Remy’s little box. How do we know otherwise? How is that he appeared at exactly this moment?”

“Suspicion makes you die younger,” Paelias said.

“Unless you get murdered in your sleep because you weren’t suspicious enough,” Remy pointed out.

“Everyone be silent,” Biri-Daar said. “The tiefling does not come with us.”

The unpaved earth that formed the hole in the keyhole was overgrown with highland brush and a few stunted, wind-sculpted trees. “It’s supposed to be in the center here, the exact center,” Keverel said. They hacked a path into the undergrowth, stopping periodically so Keverel could get his bearings. At what he determined to be the center, they tore the brush out by the roots, first chopping the larger trees out with camp hatchets. Then, using the trunks, they levered the roots up out of the earth, leaving a pit… that in the middle seemed a bit deeper than it should have been, exposing a stone that was a bit too regular in edge…

Half an hour later they had exposed the entrance to the Road-builder’s Tomb.

A simple stone stair, just wide enough to descend single file, led down into the cleared and trampled earth. Below the natural roof formed by generations of root systems, its first eight steps were exposed. Below that abbreviated space, they found a solid seven feet of earth and brush, packed by the ages into nearly stonelike hardness. “Ah, the glories of adventuring,” Kithri said.

Two hours later they had cleared it out, chipping it into pieces and handing them up in a chain to toss them out onto the plaza. Kithri, by far the smallest of them, was stuck down in the hole, levering pieces loose and scooping helmets full of loose dirt and gravel. When the landing was clear, they brushed off the door and examined it.

Unlike the paving stones, the door was unadorned. It was constructed of simple bricks and mortar. Neither Paelias nor Lucan nor Kithri could find any magical traps or bindings. “Well,” said Keverel when they had cleared the door, “Erathis forgive me.”

The door was not designed to open. Neither was it designed to withstand repeated impacts from a steel mace. Its blocks, held together only with mortar, began to shift almost immediately. Half a dozen blows had knocked it loose enough that Biri-Daar and Remy could wedge the edges of their shields into the gap and pry it open far enough for them to enter.

Biri-Daar went first, her armor aglow with a charm Keverel placed on all steel they carried. Lucan and Remy came next, then Kithri, with Paelias and Keverel acting as rear guard. When they were just inside the door, Biri-Daar stopped and said softly, “Kithri. Quick, back to the top of the stairs. Is the tiefling still there?”

She vanished and returned a moment later, her coming and going nearly soundless. “No sign of him.”

“Too bad,” Lucan said. “We could have used the company.”

Paelias stopped. “Didn’t you just-”

“One thing you can always count on from Lucan,” Kithri said, “is that he’ll be contrary.”

“Quiet,” Biri-Daar said. They moved forward into the tomb.

The first passage was long and straight and angled slightly downward. The stone under their feet was dry, the air in their lungs musty with an odd hint of spices scattered centuries ago and never dispersed by wind or age. Light from their armor and ready blades suffused the passage with a glow bright enough to illuminate but not blind. On the smooth bedrock of the walls, the story of the building of the Crow Road unfolded in a painting that stretched from entry to a plastered-over doorway at the passage’s end.

“Any sign?” Biri-Daar asked quietly.

“None I can find,” Paelias said. Keverel shook his head. Kithri darted forward to look for the kind of mechanical ambush that even the most skilled magic never found. She, too, backed away without finding anything.

Biri-Daar gave the plaster an experimental tap. All of them could hear how hollow a sound it made. She hit it again with a forearm, sending a cloud of dust rolling along the floor and leaving a visible dent in the door. Lucan punched a hole through where she had hit it and he peered into the darkness on the other side. “Antechamber,” he said. Then he sneezed.

Remy and Biri-Daar broke out a hole big enough to step through, covering themselves with choking dust that picked up the magical glow. The effect was of walking into a faintly luminescent fog as they passed into the antechamber and saw what lay within. Like many prominent personages who built themselves extravagant tombs, the Road-builder had wanted his to reflect his station and achievements in life. So in the antechamber were arranged the tools and materials of exploration and roadbuilding. In wall sconces, bejeweled surveyor’s tools gleamed next to hanging picks and shovels of solid gold. On the ceiling, a sky map was picked out in diamonds.

Along the walls below the sconces, rows of shining silver wheelbarrows were piled high with uncut gems and chunks of ore representing debris. “Amazing,” Lucan said.

“Delightful, I would say,” Paelias added. He picked up an uncut ruby the size of an acorn. “Hard to believe nobody ever bothered to come find this before.”

A distant boom echoed in the chamber and down the hall. All of them looked back toward the tomb entrance, which was much too far away to see directly. “Our tiefling friend?” Kithri wondered.

Another boom came, and the rumble of what sounded like a collapse. “Well,” Lucan said to Biri-Daar. “I hope you’re right that we can get to the Keep from inside here. Now how were we going to get out of the Keep?”

“One thing at a time,” Biri-Daar said. She was still looking back to the entry passage, and she drew her sword. The rest armed themselves as well, as the guardians of the Road-builder’s tomb began to pour into the antechamber.

They were long dead, the last crew to work on the Crow Road, buried with the Road-builder instead of beneath the stones of his road. Their bodies were held together by the posthumous strength of his magic-some had once been human, others dwarves, even a few tieflings and orcs among them. They thronged in the entry hall, dully responsive to their single imperative: to destroy the intruders.

And, incredibly, to rebuild the tomb. As Paelias flung a searing splash of light onto the ceiling, they saw back toward the entrance that some of the reanimated workers were already moving stones and mixing mortar from the dust of the floor and the black fluids of their own bodies. How many times had this happened before? “I revise my earlier statement,” Paelias said. “Instead, I choose to find it hard to believe that anyone ever survived this to get into the Keep.”

“Hold them!” Keverel cried out suddenly, as within the antechamber more walking dead emerged from the stones of the walls. He forced them back with the channeled power of Erathis, blinding and confusing them, as the rest of the party dug for their lives. They used the picks and shovels and mauls, but gold was a poor material for weapons-heavy and soft and slippery in the hands of the half-decayed guardians. A heavy sledgehammer, its striking face set with a single great emerald, went over Remy’s head and rang against the wall, cracking the gem and bending the hammer’s handle. Remy first struck off the hands holding the hammer, then the head of the animated corpse. But right behind it loomed a great hulking corpse of what must have been an ogre in life, swinging a pick whose head was as long as Remy was tall. Keverel was smashing his way through the others, breaking them apart and crushing the skulls to make sure.

At the antechamber’s entrance, Biri-Daar and Lucan and Paelias made a wall too strong for the surge of undead to break. The corpses died again and again, some of them coming back to life beneath the marching feet of their successors only to be cut down again as soon as they could rise. It was going to be up to Remy to deal with the undead ogre.

It brought its great pick down, burying it a foot into the stone floor as Remy skipped aside and hacked at its arm. Once, twice, three times he struck as the great hulking zombie worked the pick free. On the third blow, he severed its arm just above the elbow. It swung the stump at him, spraying him with a foul black fluid. With its other hand it got the pick free and pivoted to gut him with a sideways swipe.

Remy ducked under it and dragged his blade along the underside of its wrist, cutting it to the bone. The pick flew from its hand and crashed into the other wall, crushing a smaller zombie against the row of wheelbarrows. The ogre’s severed arm still clung to the pick handle. It reached for Remy, its eyes infernally alight.

And then one of them went out, its light replaced by the gentle gleam of Keverel’s magic imbuing the steel haft of one of Kithri’s throwing knives. A moment later, the same happened to its other eye. Remy closed, swinging his sword as if cutting down a tree. He chopped through one of its legs and danced back as it fell. Behind him he heard Biri-Daar and Lucan shouting about something but he could not turn to see what it was; as the zombie hulk hit the ground, he struck again and again at its blinded head, eventually hacking away part of its skull and brain. Tremors ran through it, subsiding into silence.

Remy turned to see that everyone else had stopped fighting as well. All visible corpses were just that-corpses. Keverel was whispering blessings over them to permanently release those that had been rising again.

Ten or twelve feet outside the antechamber door, the last stones were being fitted into a new wall closing off the hall. The Road-builder’s crew were doing their jobs.

“This was a trap for wandering tomb robbers,” Paelias said. “Not hardy fighting folk such as ourselves. One wonders if the Road-builder left anything a little more interesting.”

“More interesting than being forced to go through the rest of the tomb and discover what joys await us in the Inverted Keep? Careful what you wish for,” Kithri said. She was eyeing the ceiling, and as soon as she spoke, she began climbing one of the walls, using the edges of alcove and sconce for footholds until she was within arm’s reach of the ceiling. Then out came a stubby, thick-bladed knife and she began to work it into the nearest of the star map’s constellations.

“Don’t,” said Paelias.

Kithri couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “These are diamonds, Paelias. What do you mean, ‘don’t’?”

“I mean don’t,” he said. “It is not for nothing that I chose the path of the starpact. Maps of the sky are sacred.”

“I’ll put something else in their place,” Kithri said.

“Kithri. Look around you. Is there not enough to carry?”

The argument might have gone farther, but the ogre corpse interrupted it by coming back to life. It reared up onto its single leg, wounds still gaping, the pulpy mass of its brain sliding out through the holes in its skull left by Remy’s sword. With the advantage of surprise, it struck with its remaining hand, the momentum of the blow toppling it off balance even as its open palm swatted Paelias flat against the wall.

Keverel jumped forward, his mace crashing into its head as it hit the ground again. He pounded it into silence, then spoke his blessing and release. The others were gathering around Paelias, who had fallen motionless across two of the wheelbarrows, his posture not unlike the vanquished zombie crushed by the hulk’s pick. Lucan slapped lightly at his face, and Paelias’s eyes slitted open. He said something in a language Remy didn’t understand.

Lucan answered in the same language. Elvish, Remy realized. Lucan looked up at Keverel, who was wiping his mace clean. “His mind is scrambled,” Lucan said.

The cleric squatted in front of Paelias, who focused on him with difficulty. “Paelias,” Keverel said. “Do you know who I am?”

“The Erathian,” Paelias said. “Keverel. Holy man.”

“Yes,” Keverel said. Out of Paelias’s field of vision, he was doing something with his hands. Blood began to trickle from the star elf’s nose. He licked it from his lips, but kept eye contact with Keverel.

“We can’t stay here,” Biri-Daar said. “The crew will awaken again if we are here long enough to let them.”

“Perhaps not,” Kithri said.

Lucan nodded. “Perhaps they have done their work once they have walled us in.” From the other side of the new wall, the sounds of building echoed. The crew was completing its work.

“Do they plant the trees again?” Kithri wondered.

“Don’t be stupid, Kithri,” Paelias said suddenly. “They’re zombies. The undead don’t go out in broad daylight to plant trees, for the gods’ sakes.”

Everyone looked at Keverel for confirmation. He winked. Paelias looked around at each of them, wiping away the blood from his lip. “What?” he said. “What?”

“Never mind. Are you fit to go on?” Biri-Daar asked.

“If he can insult me, he’s ready,” Kithri said. “Let’s get what we can carry and see what the rest of this hole has to offer.”

“Not the star map,” Paelias said.

Kithri glared at him. “Fine. Not the star map.” She looked up at it with longing that would have been touching had it not been motivated entirely by greed. Then she sifted through the litter of spilled gemstones and dismembered zombies, looking for the most efficient way to fill her pockets with riches.

Remy found himself next to Keverel as they found a zigzagging descending passage from the antechamber to what they assumed must be the actual burial chamber. “What did you to do him?” he murmured, not wanting Paelias to hear.

“Some healing closes wounds on the outside of the body, some on the inside,” Keverel said. “His wound was to both body and mind, at the place where they meet. Very difficult to minister to those. But Erathis is powerful. He has never deserted me in a time of need.”

Biri-Daar hissed from just ahead, a signal they had learned meant shut up, potential danger. Slowing, the group drew tighter as they came to a short stair at the bottom of which was another plastered-over entrance. On the floor directly in front of it lay a trowel and a pan of long-dried plaster. Biri-Daar descended the stair and said, “Be ready for the road crew.”

Weapons drawn, they looked in all directions as she slid the pan and trowel out of the way. Nothing happened. She tapped at the plaster. Nothing. “Be ready,” she said again, and punched a hole in the plaster.

The doorway was timbered over as well as plastered, and took longer to break down. When they were done there was still no sign of the road crew. They stepped over the rubble of the doorway into the Road-builder’s burial chamber.

It was two or three times as large, in every dimension, as the antechamber. Their light barely reached the ceiling, but it did manage to pick out a diamond star map slightly different than the previous. Remy wondered if each one reflected the sky on a particular date, and if so what the dates were. The Road-builder’s death? The completion of the Crow Road? Probably he would never know. The treasures in the burial chamber were different. The antechamber had celebrated the Road-builder’s tools; the burial chamber celebrated the culmination of the work. The floor was a map of the Dragondown, with the Crow Road picked out in a single poured stream of gold. The Whitefall was a string of opals, the Blackfall obsidian. The Dragondown Gulf, covering nearly a quarter of the room’s floor, was worked from lapis lazuli. In the center of the room, the Road-builder’s sarcophagus sat untouched. Four feet high and seemingly large enough for three men, it was inlaid in gold, jade, and mother-of-pearl with a fantastically complicated collage of different creatures. There were men and halflings, crows and wolves, legendary creatures Remy had never believed existed such as beholders and the semi-sentient molds said to creep the darkest corners of dungeons. Demons, dragons, vampires…

“These are all of the creatures he buried under the road,” Keverel said. “His menagerie.”

Lucan walked over to it and tapped on its lid. “Do we crack it?”

Remy looked to Biri-Daar, knowing what her answer would be. She would have enough respect for the dead that she would not have the sarcophagus itself violated even if they took with them everything else they could carry.

“Yes,” she said.

Stunned, Remy echoed her. “Yes?”

“It has been many centuries since the Road-builder lay in this tomb,” she said. “Open it.”

Lucan found the seam dividing lid and case. He wedged the blade of his knife into it, working it all the way around the sarcophagus. Bits of precious stone and gold flaked onto the floor. “I’m going to need a hand here,” he said when he’d circumambulated the sarcophagus. Biri-Daar, Keverel, and Remy stepped up.

On Lucan’s count of three, the four of them heaved the lid up. It overbalanced, tipping on end and sliding to the floor with a deafening boom. “That ought to bring the road crew along,” Kithri observed. Whatever anxiety the idea provoked in her was not enough to prevent her stooping to scoop up some of the larger fragments of gold inlay.

The inside of the sarcophagus, as Biri-Daar had suggested, was empty.

But not just empty. Instead of a floor, only black space lay at its bottom. A cold damp breath blew out of it.

“Rope,” Biri-Daar said.

Among them, they had two hundred feet. “This is where we go down to go up,” Lucan said.

“And then,” Remy added, remembering their morning’s exchange, “up will be down. Is two hundred feet enough?” he added as the rope uncoiled down into the darkness.

“Someone has to go first to find out,” Keverel said. “I will.”

“No, you won’t,” Kithri said. “I will. I’m light enough that if there isn’t enough rope you can pull me back up.”

“The halfling talks sense for a change,” Lucan said.

Kithri climbed up onto the lip of the sarcophagus, tipped an imaginary cap at them, and rappelled away into the darkness. She looked up when all of her save her face was in shadow. “One tug means all is well. Two means leave me. If you feel two, don’t believe it. What I mean is three, except I didn’t have time.”

“What would three mean?” Paelias asked.

“Help,” she said, and lowered herself out of sight.

They had received no message from her when the road crew arrived at the door looking to clean up their mess… and them with it.

This was the elite, the foremen and their hand-picked laborers. They were brawny, grim, twirling their picks and mauls with flippant menace. There were dozens of them, crowding the passage from the burial chamber doorway past the first bend and beyond. “Don’t think we can let them rebuild the sarcophagus lid,” Paelias said, looking down at the pieces of it scattered around their feet.

“Not until we get down there,” Lucan agreed.

Remy shrugged. “Or Kithri comes back up.”

“Hold them,” Biri-Daar said.

The words had not left her mouth before Lucan’s arrows were ripping into the front ranks of the crew. As they slowed, piling the others up behind them, Remy and Biri-Daar herself met them at the doorway, holding them at the choke point where they couldn’t use their numerical advantage. Keverel, a step back, held forth his holy symbol. “Erathis commands!” he boomed. “You shall not enter!”

Slowed, pained by the holy force of the god, the undead tried to press forward. “Keep them back, Keverel,” Paelias said. He was leaning over the edge of the sarcophagus, the fingers of one hand resting on the rope. “We’ve got a tug.”

“Remy, you and the eladrin go,” Biri-Daar said. “Lucan too.” She had her talisman of Bahamut out; its fierce glow threw the room’s shadows into sharp relief and washed over the undead crew, driving them back. Remy started to argue, but Lucan shouldered his bow and caught Remy’s arm.

“It’s not cowardice when the chief tells you retreat,” he said. “We go to the Keep. So let’s go.”

When they got back to the sarcophagus, Paelias was already on the rope, skipping nimbly down the seemingly bottomless shaft. “Will the rope hold all of us?” he called.

“Two, anyway,” Lucan answered. “Go quickly and tug when you’re at the bottom. Go!”

Paelias went. Remy and Lucan looked toward the door. Keverel and Biri-Daar appeared to be holding the road crew back. “Go,” Lucan told Remy.

Remy shook his head. “You.”

“Remy, I’m going to have to throw you if you get stubborn. Then your box will break and every demon in the Dragondown will be here before we can catch our breath. Do you want that?” Lucan winked. “Go.”

The rope was taut in Remy’s hands, and trembling as Paelias rappelled farther down below him. His scabbard tangled his legs and his shield scraped against the opposite wall of the shaft as he lowered himself away from the rim. “Go, go,” Lucan said again. He looked up. “How goes it?”

“Move, Lucan!” Biri-Daar’s voice rang down the shaft.

Lucan’s face appeared over the rim. “Remy!” he called. “Is the rope slack under you?”

Remy braced his feet and reached down. The rope moved freely in his hand. “Yes,” he called back. “But I didn’t feel any tug.”

“Devil take the tug,” Lucan said, swinging his leg over the edge. “Going, Biri-Daar! Fall back, let’s go!” As he dropped into the shaft, Lucan looked down over his shoulder. “Quickly, Remy. Quickly. Even Erathis won’t hold them back forever.”

Remy had climbed his share of walls. And drainpipes, rope ladders, timber pilings… if it was a way to get from a low place to a high place or the other way around, Remy had climbed it. But none of that had prepared him for rappelling down a rope into pitch darkness of uncertain depth with a tenuous restraint holding back an undead army above him that would, given the chance, cast his rope down into the darkness after his suddenly falling body. Above him, he saw Lucan’s silhouette, and above it the rectangle of the sarcophagus rim, illuminated by the flowing energies of Erathis and Bahamut. “Biri-Daar! Keverel!” Lucan shouted. “Let’s go!”

From below Remy heard a voice. Kithri, he thought, but he couldn’t hear what she was saying. He called down to her, but she didn’t answer. Something lethal was doubtless lying in wait for them. Remy rehearsed the ways that he could finish the descent, come down off the rope, find his feet, and be ready to fight while a desperate and cruel enemy awaited him. Would Kithri and Paelias still be alive? He hadn’t heard any sounds of battle, or even the quick sounds of an ambush. No ring of steel on steel, no screams, no crash of bodies…

“Remy,” Kithri said.

She was closer than he would have expected. Remy looked down-and realized that down was no longer down. He was on his belly, scooting backward along a narrow tunnel. What he’d thought was looking down, was looking over his shoulder. Kithri was there, beckoning him. “You need to get off that rope,” she said. “I’m not sure when you move from tomb to keep, but I do know that we can’t be sure how far someone would fall along the way if we got too many people on that rope. Come on.”

He doubled around in the tight space and belly-crawled the rest of the way, coming out into a low, dark room that smelled as bad as any place he had ever been in his life. “Gods,” he said. “What happened in here.”

“Whatever used to happen in the Keep,” Kithri said, “its current residents still need a sewer. Get over here.” She led him across the floor to a raised ledge out of the muck, where Paelias was scraping filth from his boots. “Charming, these acts of derring-do,” the eladrin muttered. “Oh, look, our boy Remy is here. Welcome to the Inverted Keep.”

From the tunnel-the drain, Remy realized-that somehow, through some magic, led to the tomb of the Road-builder, there came a flare of fire. Biri-Daar’s roar echoed after it. Remy started up and headed back toward the mouth of the drain, but Paelias stopped him. Lucan appeared, head and shoulders over the drain’s edge before he realized what he was about to dive into. With an oath to match the environment, he pulled up short. “What have we done here?” he said.

As he skirted the edge of the sewer pit, Biri-Daar skidded out of the drain. “Keverel!” she called.

The cleric’s voice sounded very far away. “Coming…”

A moment later he struggled into view. Blood covered the left side of his face and he moved gingerly as he swung his legs around to step down. “Took a fall,” he said. “The road crew was kind enough to throw the rope down while they restored the tomb to its pristine state.”

Heedless of the thigh-deep filth, Biri-Daar recrossed the sewer pit and lifted Keverel into her arms. She set the cleric down on the ledge. “Lucan,” she said. “See to him.”

The ranger looked over Keverel, first checking to see that the gash on his head was superficial and then working down the length of his body. “Nothing seems broken,” he said, “and I think the cut on his head is just a cut on his head. What say you, holy man? Take a drink.”

Keverel drank from the skin Lucan offered. He pushed himself to a sitting position against the wall and said, “My head aches and only this witch doctor of a ranger would say that nothing is wrong with the rest of me. But I’ll feel better if we get out of this stench.”

“Me too,” Kithri agreed. “As it happens, there’s a door right over here.”

By the light from her knife blade, she showed them a barred iron door. “An old lock,” she said, producing a set of picks folded into a leather purse. “I’ll have it open before Lucan can find something else to complain about.”

“I doubt that very much,” Lucan said. “For example, I will complain about Keverel’s ignorance of shamanistic traditions among the rangers of the Nentir Vale.”

The lock popped open. “See?” Kithri said.

“See what? I complained,” Lucan said.

“No, you said you were going to. I win.” She smiled sweetly at him and swung the door open with a shriek of rusted hinges that must have been audible to every denizen of the Keep.

“Where does it go?” Paelias wondered.

Biri-Daar walked through into the drier and infinitely less odoriferous chamber beyond, a small landing at the foot of a stair going up. “It goes out of there,” she reported. “What else do we need to know right now?”

They climbed the stairs, gradually shedding the stink of the sewer pit-and also, more ominously, shedding the light charm Keverel had maintained on the steel they wore or held. “Something about the magic of this place,” he said, with a worried expression.

“Or something with you,” Kithri said. “Truth, holy man. Is the cut on your head just a cut on your head?”

He nodded. “Here,” Biri-Daar said, holding out a small pewter vial to him. Keverel took it with a questioning look.

“It is a healing brew, from the clan,” she said. “If it can heal the burns of an acid fog or the madness of hearing a banshee-and it can, I have seen it-it can dispel whatever ails you.”

Keverel drank it off, his face twisting. “Awful,” he gasped.

“My people are not vintners,” Biri-Daar said. Then, unexpectedly, she laughed. On they went into what appeared to have been a dungeon once. The cell doors were open and hanging crookedly on rusted or broken hinges. “The Road-builder may know we are here already,” Biri-Daar said. “We must be on guard.”

They peered into each empty cell as they passed. Some contained bones, and once or twice a rat flitted through their light back into the darkened corners. But nothing rose to oppose them. A torture chamber exposed to the light for the first time in centuries yielded only hanging chains and instruments long since corroded into ruin. After it, they found a stair leading up. As they climbed it, Lucan said, “We’re going down right now.”

“Don’t talk about it.” Paelias looked a bit queasy.

“Best to keep it in mind, I think,” Lucan said.

“Keep it in mind all you want,” the star elf replied. “Just don’t talk about it.”

That was when Remy sprung the trap. He felt a stone shift under his foot and instinctively he leaped forward and up to the next stair, one hand against the wall to his right, looking down between his feet for the hole or blade or poisoned needle he was sure must be there. As he landed, he heard a fading scream. He spun and saw that a pit yawned open where the two stairs below him had been. Stones at its edges were still tumbling inward. Shocked, Remy saw Kithri and Paelias above the gap, Keverel below it-and Lucan hanging by his hands from its edge, scrabbling to get a foothold on the vertical wall below.

“Biri-Daar!” Kithri screamed down into the darkness. An answering roar told them she was alive. Paelias was reaching down for Lucan when he looked up, said, “If the fall didn’t kill her, it won’t kill me either,” and let go.

“Pelor,” Remy whispered. The others were shouting down into the hole. He heard Lucan’s answering voice, Biri-Daar still roaring. He heard the clash and ring of steel, and a throaty inhuman rumble like no voiced sound Remy could remember.

The next thing he knew he was jumping in himself, tearing free of Paelias’s grasp and holding out his gloved hands to keep track of the walls as he fell. His mouth opened and a barbarian’s yell came out. It felt good. Whatever creature was down there, it would know that Remy of Avankil was coming.

He hit the ground in a rubbish heap. Rotting garbage and discarded bits of clay, glass, wood-everything that might conceivably have been thrown away during the years of the Keep’s normal existence-splattered away from him as he sank waist-deep in the slippery muck at the bottom. There was shouting, and that gurgling rumble, echoing all around him. Light flared as if Biri-Daar was using her dragonbreath just around the bend… but what bend? Remy couldn’t tell where the walls were. He pulled one of his feet free, feeling it hang up on something hard; as he shifted his weight, looking around for Lucan and Biri-Daar, he realized that his foot was stuck beneath a long bone. “Out of the way!” someone shouted from above. Remy slogged off to his right as Paelias and Kithri hurtled out of the darkness into the filth side by side. They too fought their way off to one side as Keverel scarped down the chute and landed awkwardly on his back, nearly disappearing into the refuse before Remy and Paelias caught him and steadied him so he could get upright.

“Lucan!” Remy called. “Biri-Daar!”

Light flared again, and Remy started to understand that the room they were in curled in on itself. He put one hand on the inside wall of the curve and followed it. Ten steps later he was in sight of Biri-Daar and Lucan. And the three incredible creatures that menaced them.

They were low to the ground and reptilian at first, their skin slick and oily, their legs splayed and jointed like an alligator’s. But they were larger than any alligator Remy had ever seen, and their mouths were nearly circular, gaping large enough to swallow a halfling whole. From their shoulders sprouted tentacles with clusters of serrated barbs at their tips, and-most incredible of all-a tail-stalk with a vertical row of three reddish eyes, faintly luminescent, curled over the beasts’ backs, wavering back and forth to take in the newcomers.

“Otyugh,” Keverel said from just behind him. “If we can see three, there are probably more.” He and Paelias pivoted to form a rear guard as Remy and Kithri surged forward. One of the otyughs was wounded, its tentacles both amputated and great rents showing around its jaws. Taking advantage of their brief moment of surprise, Remy slashed its eyestalk off. The spurt of blood smelled even worse than the rotted slush underfoot. Tears filled Remy’s eyes; he blinked them away and struck again as Biri-Daar hit the otyugh from her side with a reversed blow that tore huge gashes along the hollow of its jaw. In a fountain of stinking blood, the creature fell, wallowing in its death throes.

Fresh yells from behind him told Remy that Keverel and Paelias were encountering more of the otyughs. He closed in on the second facing Lucan and Biri-Daar; the third, mortally wounded by Lucan’s flickering blade, waved its tentacles feebly as it died. In the uncertain light Remy could see that both Biri-Daar and Lucan were wounded. Infection would be almost certain given the environment. He hoped that Lucan’s ranger lore would keep both of them from blood poisoning.

Over his shoulder he saw that Paelias and Keverel already had dispatched the fourth otyugh. Remy turned back to the sole survivor of the first three. With Biri-Daar and Lucan and Kithri, he cut it down, Lucan applying the killing stroke.

Immediately Keverel and Lucan began treating wounds. Biri-Daar and Lucan himself were scored by the tentacles’ barbs. “A walking font of disease, the otyugh,” Keverel said, disgust plain on his face. The worst wound was on Biri-Daar’s hip and thigh, where one of the otyughs had bitten partially through her armor. The punctures left were deep and already blackening around the edges. Fever was beginning to shine in her eyes.

Lucan found a packet of dried herbs in his satchel and ground them between his fingers. He pressed a small amount into each puncture, Biri-Daar hissing as he did so. “That will hold the infection off. Or should. Let’s get healing, holy man,” he said.

“Until we get out of this rot, no healing will take hold,” Keverel said.

“Light,” Paelias said. A stone in his hand blazed up brilliantly, illuminating the dimensions of the room. It was high-ceilinged, with holes in the ceiling that must have been rubbish outfalls. “Back to the chute from the stairwell,” he said. “Perhaps we can climb it.”

But it was too high from the floor. Paelias played his light around, noting every cranny and shadowed corner in the spiral room. “Why this shape?” he wondered aloud. “The floor slopes down as well. It’s-”

“There’s probably a drain at the bottom. Long ago, when this keep was still in the ground, its builder found a way to let the garbage rot and drain into an underground river. It’s the same thing they do at Crow Fork Market, no?” Lucan thought for a moment. “If we could get out that drain, we might be able to scale the side of the Keep.”

“Are we dam-builders now?” Kithri asked. “We’d have to hold all this back to get through this drain. If it’s there. And if it’s in a place that would let us get to the outside of the Keep and climb up.”

“You mean down,” Lucan said.

“If only I worshiped a god,” Kithri said. “Then I would be able to plead for you to be struck dead.”

Since there was no way up, they decided to go down. First they had to find pieces of debris large enough that they might be able to build some kind of barrier, a coffer dam of sorts they could use to expose the drain.

If there was a drain.

And they had to work fast because the miasma of the rubbish pit was very near to overcoming all of them, most threateningly Biri-Daar. She moved sluggishly, the pollution in her blood barely held at bay by Lucan’s herbs and Keverel’s healing magics. “There’s only so much we can do down here,” Keverel said. “We need to get out soon or that fever’s going to…” He trailed off.

“So much for your god’s favor,” Kithri said.

Keverel looked at her and held her gaze until she looked away. “Blasphemy isn’t getting us anywhere either.”

“How is it that we’re wading around in rotted potato peels when no living human has eaten a meal in this castle in… what? Hundreds of years?” Remy looked around in consternation.

“I don’t think time passes here the way it does outside,” Keverel answered. “These old vegetables might have been peeled and discarded a thousand years ago.”

“Next time I go adventuring, I’m staying above ground.”

“We are above ground, remember? And at least it’s not a sewer,” Lucan joked. They found several pieces of wood all together near the mouth of the trap chute and started working them loose to take farther down near the drain. Then Paelias stopped.

“Did you hear that?” he asked.

They listened. From the chute came a whispering, scraping sound. Then a whistle.

They looked at each other. Bad enough, ran the thought through every mind. Bad enough that we should be trapped down here; now something comes down into the trap to finish us?

Then they heard a voice. “Hsst! Is that Biri-Daar the mighty dragonborn paladin down there?” After a silence, the voice came again. “Come now! I heard you speaking to each other. I threw a rope down. Climb up or starve. It’s your choice, but make it soon. I’m not waiting forever.”

Paelias shone his light up into the chute. The curling end of a rope lay less than four feet from its mouth. “Ah, light,” came the voice. “See the rope? Let’s go!”

“It’s the tiefling,” Keverel said. He looked at Biri-Daar.

“Yes,” she said. Her eyes were dull with weariness and fever. “It’s the tiefling. Climb.”

Obek’s saturnine visage hovered over each of them in turn as they reached the steepest part of the climb, just below the gap in the stairs. “So,” he said when all six of them were back on the stairs. “Shall we move along to the tower of the keep?”

“Not until we get some explanation,” Keverel said. “Begin with how you came to be here.”

“I went through the Road-builder’s Tomb, just as you did.” Obek looked smug. He had the upper hand on them, and knew it, and looked determined to enjoy it while he could. Sitting there on the stairs as if they were all around a tavern table, he waited for their approbation.

“You fought your way through the road crew on your own,” Lucan said, his voice heavy with sarcasm.

“No,” Obek said. “I went straight through the tomb, not stopping to loot or fight. The Road-builder’s crew only fights if you are still there when they arrive to do their work. Then I followed your trail to this stair, where it ended. Simple. Now. To the tower?”

Biri-Daar’s lidded gaze had remained on the tiefling during the exchange. Remy wondered whether her fever was subsiding now that they were out of the pit. “Obek,” she said.

He stopped his needling and looked at her. Something deep and unspoken hung between them. Remy understood that he would never understand it. Human history was evidence that if humans were good at one thing, it was forgetting. Dragonborn and tiefling, it seemed, kept their histories alive… and in that was the danger that the past would rise up and overwhelm the present. That was what had driven Biri-Daar out on their quest to begin with, the sense that she could and must redress the failure of an ancestor.

I’ll take the present, Remy thought. It’s all I can handle. Let the past and future take care of themselves.

“You are resourceful and strong. So are the rest of us.” Biri-Daar paused. “But why dare the Road-builder’s Tomb so you can follow us to the perils of the Keep? There is more to this than you needing political cover to get back into Karga Kul.”

The tiefling leaned forward and the smile faded from his face. When he spoke, he spoke to Biri-Daar, but his words were meant for them all. “People look at me and see a devil. They’ve all heard the stories about Bael Turath. Thousands of years ago this happened, and yet I am held to account for it. All tieflings are. We have been pariahs ever since. Soldiers, sailors, explorers… we live hard, we die young. None of it ever makes any difference.” Obek’s eyes glowed dimly in the near-darkness. “You want to know why I have to get back into Karga Kul? Because if I do not, and the Seal is broken, every demon that comes through the gate is going to mean a thousand tieflings killed in cold blood somewhere else because they are mistaken for the demon-haunted. Some of them will deserve it. Most of them will not.”

Obek stood. “I do not wish to have that on my soul when I go to meet my gods.”

“Does anyone here believe a word he is saying?” Lucan looked from one of them to the other disbelievingly. “The Road-builder’s crew ignores you if you just keep moving? Surely we are not going to believe that just because he says it.”

Obek returned his gaze. “You want answers, friend elf, or are you content to turn your friends against me?”

“I want answers,” Biri-Daar said.

“The stories of the Road-builder’s Tomb are around for certain people to hear,” Obek said. “I have heard them. I could have told you of the crew if you had bothered to ask. I know a man who survived the trip through the Tomb and the Keep. The way he told it, the Road-builder let him live to spread the story… but took his hands so he would not loot the tomb. He told the story for his bread.”

“Where did he tell this story?” Biri-Daar asked. “Not in Karga Kul. Every story of the Road-builder that has traveled there, I have heard.”

“And I in Toradan,” Keverel chimed in.

“Different stories travel to Saak-Opole,” Obek said. “Probably all of the stories are lies, but we Northerners know better than to trust anything that comes from Avankil or Toradan, and we know that in Karga Kul is one of the thin places between our world and the Abyssal realms. Fit those two things together, and you know why I am here.”

There was a long silence. Remy did not know what to do. He was far out of his depth and had no idea how any of them could ascertain the truth of Obek’s tales, and tales about tales. A man without hands who had survived the Keep? Fanciful. But not impossible. What were they going to do? Remy waited, knowing that all he could do was follow the lead of Biri-Daar and Keverel, whose quest this was.

In the end, it was Keverel who spoke. “Obek of Saak-Opole,” he said. “We consent to have you travel with us. But know that none of us may expect to survive to see Karga Kul. Or what may happen once we are there again.”

Obek extended his right hand. “You will see,” he said. “There will come a time when you look at each other and think yourselves fools for debating over this so long.”

As they shook hands, Remy realized it was the first time he had ever touched a tiefling. He had seen them occasionally in Avankil, but the superstitions about the race died hard. Few in that city trusted tieflings-or dragonborn, for that matter, but the dragonborn were understood to be of a higher nature. Tieflings, the average citizen of the Dragondown believed, were still barely a step away from the Abyssal side of their heritage.

“So, you are Remy,” Obek said. “What is it you carry, Remy?”

Steel sang as Lucan drew, the point of his sword snapping still an inch from the hollow under Obek’s jaw. “That’s the wrong question, tiefling,” Lucan said.

“Draw back, ranger,” Obek said. He didn’t seem afraid. His hand in Remy’s was callused and powerful, but Remy felt no threat.

“Answer, then.”

“I overheard certain things at Iskar’s Landing,” Obek said. “And put them together with the rumors that rumble from the darker corners of Karga Kul and Toradan. There are those who want Philomen’s errand completed, and those who would take the cargo and send it to the bottom of the Gulf.” His eyes settled on Remy again.

“We do not know what Philomen’s errand is,” Biri-Daar pointed out. “That is why we brought Remy. We could not chance letting his package fall into the wrong hands.”

“No one seems to know what the errand is,” Obek said. “You have been in the wilderness for some time. I have been in the city. Rumors fly, and there are more plots afoot than anyone can count. There has been a great slaughter in the Monastery of the Cliff at Toradan, and demons cluster like flies in the older parts of Karga Kul. Whatever he has, it is a critical piece of a very important puzzle.”

Paelias stepped forward and pushed Lucan’s sword down. “So by gathering up our hapless Remy and his most dangerous cargo, we have put ourselves in the same danger he is in.”

“Truth.” Obek nodded. He turned back to Biri-Daar. “You are here for Moidan’s Quill, are you not?”

There was a long pause before she answered. “Yes.”

“Then you will be facing the Road-builder himself,” Obek said.

“He will not be the worst we face,” Biri-Daar said.

“He will be if he kills us all,” Kithri said. Everyone turned to look at her. “It’s true,” she said. “Since we’re all of a sudden so concerned with truth above all else.”

Biri-Daar started climbing the stairs again. She seemed stronger. They would need her at her strongest, Remy thought. All of them climbed up and out of the lower levels of the Keep, emerging to the strangest sight any of them had ever beheld.

Over their heads, the churning ribbon of the Whitefall, the black stones of the canyon that contained it, the greens and browns and yellows of the highlands stretching away to the Draco Serrata in one direction and the coastal plains in the other. A sky of every color but blue, and the sky itself, underneath and endless, darkening directly below their feet to a midnight indigo in which they could see the faintest pinpricks of stars.

“My stomach will not accept this,” Lucan said. He turned away from the vista, facing the wall of the Keep’s central tower.

The rest of them looked around the courtyard, where lay the remnants of the Keep’s first garrison and residents-their bones, their clothing, their boots. Kithri and Remy kicked through it, wondering if there was anything of value and wondering, too, whether these long-dead soldiers and cooks would rise to attack the living intruders. But the bones stayed dead, and yielded nothing more interesting than a ring of keys. Kithri picked them up. They were iron, and without rust.

“Interesting,” Paelias said. “There’s no rhyme or reason to the way things age and decay. In the refuse pit I saw an apple core that looked as if someone had bitten into it this morning. Here we have bones as dry as any found in a thousand-year-old tomb.”

“It’s a dead man’s magic,” Lucan said. “Emphasis on the man. Humans know so little of time that they have even less grasp of it after they die.”

The eladrin and the elf ranger looked each other in the eye, something passing between them. “What?” Keverel asked.

“Lich,” Biri-Daar said. “They are deciding between them that the Road-builder has become a lich.”

“Yes,” Paelias said.

Remy looked at each member of the group in turn. They were all facing one another except him and Obek. Sidling a step closer to the tiefling, he asked quietly, “What’s a lich?”

“A human wizard of great power,” Keverel said, “who undergoes a dark ritual to survive beyond death. If the Road-builder is a lich, we’re going to need to find his phylactery, the vessel that contains his soul. We must destroy it to kill him. It will be somewhere in the Keep.”

“Perhaps, perhaps not,” Paelias interjected. “For all we know it’s back in the tomb. It could be anywhere.”

Keverel looked doubtful. “It’s a rare lich that wants its phylactery too far away. But we shall find out soon enough.”

Over at the wall, Biri-Daar looked out through an arrow slit, listening absently to the lich discussion. Remy had come to the wall as well, his head spinning with the inversion of earth and sky. The paladin’s brief season of humor seemed to have faded. Again she was her implacably determined paladin self. “I fear the worst about the quill,” she said, “and we must find it to confirm those fears or teach me that they were mistaken.”

“Biri-Daar.” She looked over at him. Remy was nervous to say what he was about to say, but it needed to be said. “Couldn’t we leave the box here?”

“We don’t know what’s inside,” she said.

“True,” he said.

“You will carry it until the gods will that you put it down,” she said. “There is no avoiding that. Accept your burden, Remy. Carry it through. The reasons will become clear to you.”

He realized then that he was more like Kithri or Lucan than Keverel or Biri-Daar. The gods were real to him but distant. He spoke the name of Pelor because it had been spoken around him in his boyhood. In contrast, Erathis and Bahamut were real and present, a constant and living influence over the cleric and the dragonborn paladin.

Looking out the window at the bottomless sky below, Biri-Daar said, “There is a long way to fall.”

“How far would you fall? Before you turned around and started to fall down. Real down.” Kithri had appeared next to them. She looked confused. “When we came down the shaft inside the Road-builder’s sarcophagus, one moment it was climbing down and the next up and down weren’t the same directions. How far away… is there a magical field?”

Paelias, also coming over to lean against the windowsill, shook his head. “I do not know. This is an ancient magic, a kind of magic few initiates in any discipline would attempt-would know how to attempt-today.”

“Back to the lich,” Biri-Daar said. “O eladrin, you manipulate the conversation with surpassing skill.”

Paelias rolled his eyes. “Simple truths are all I speak.”

“It’s time to go.” Biri-Daar shifted the straps of her shield and walked from the wall to the great double doors, bound in dwarf-forged iron, that hid the mysteries of the central keep.

The great hall of the keep was quiet and cool, the only light within cast by the gap between the open doors. Once the hall would have been alive with a fire in the hearth, music from bards and jongleurs, the echoing impacts of bootheels and the click of dogs’ nails, but all of those noises were lost to the past. What remained was silence. “Where will the Road-builder be?” Biri-Daar asked, talking to herself. She turned to Lucan and Keverel, who had entered behind her. “How many towers are there? I thought I counted four from the ground.”

“Four at the outer corners of the walls, and then there are four in more of a diamond shape inside,” Lucan answered. “I made a circuit to be sure. It looks as if there’s some kind of bridge connecting the tops of all four towers.”

“I’ll answer your question,” Obek said. “The Road-builder will be where he can see his road. That means up.” He pointed to an open stairwell at the far end of the great hall. “All the way up, is my guess.”

Up into the tower they climbed. At each landing they stopped and broke down the doors facing each other across the tattered woven rugs that were the only splash of color in the gray stone of the tower’s interior. The rooms had once, perhaps, been sentry posts or firing positions for archers, storage areas or maid’s quarters. They were small, furnished only with ruins, their slitted windows looking out into the dizzying inverted outside world. On the sixth landing, Biri-Daar held up a hand. “Kithri,” she said. “Up one floor and back, quickly.”

Kithri could move like smoke. She was back within a minute, but even that minute was long enough for the rest of them to grow edgy and over-watchful, certain that something had happened to her and that they were waiting for an onrushing doom.

Then Kithri reappeared. “Next floor opens onto a bridge,” she said. “It passes over the courtyard inside the central keep to a rooftop garden. If you go the other way on the bridge, it connects all of the towers-just like Lucan thought from down below.”

Biri-Daar nodded. “That garden is where the Road-builder, when he was human, was known to study and walk. Or so the stories would have it. If he has become a lich, he will be there or he will be inside the chambers that adjoin it. From here, we must act as if he will attack at any moment.”

They assumed their battle order, altered with the addition of Obek, and ascended that last floor, coming out onto the open stone bridge that arched from the tower to the Road-builder’s garden. “Don’t look up,” Biri-Daar said.

“Or down,” Lucan added. Obek humored him with a dry chuckle.

Remy heeded neither injunction. He had never been afraid of heights, or of hanging upside down, and the sheer displaced wonder of the Inverted Keep kept drawing his attention. He looked down, and there were stars beyond the walls of the keep; the broken stone bridge protruding from its main portcullis gate obscured a fingernail moon, ghostly in the afternoon sky. He looked up, and there was the thunder of the Whitefall, in fierce rapids above them, canyon walls descending red and gray to the highland where the Road-builder’s Tomb sat below the keyhole at the end of the Crow Road. Remy could see the ridge where they had camped, and where Obek had waited for them to go into the Tomb and then followed when they were far enough ahead that the Road-builder’s crew had had the time to do their repairs.

The tiefling walked at Remy’s right. He too seemed to be enjoying the view. “I wonder how far one would have to jump before down would be down again,” he said, and tapped Remy with an elbow. “Eh?”

“I was wondering the same thing downstairs,” Remy said. Up this high, he wasn’t quite as keen to discover the answer.

Ahead of them, the bridge peaked and then began its descent toward the garden. In another hundred yards they would have their answers about the Road-builder, one way or another. Keverel whispered a blessing of strength and fortitude over them. Remy felt the strength of the cleric’s belief wash through him, invigorating his limbs and focusing his mind. There would be battle and there would be victory. They started their descent to the garden.

As they approached, they began to see details. The garden was a riot of undead plant life and bizarre hybrids, fruits that looked like faces and flowers that dripped blood or gave off faint sparks when a breeze pushed them too close together. “I wouldn’t touch anything in there if you can avoid it,” Lucan said.

Kithri chuckled. “You don’t need to be a ranger to see that.”

The walls around the roof garden were as high as a man. Built along one of them was a long greenhouse with an enclosed stone structure set into a corner of the wall. Smoke began to curl from Biri-Daar’s nostrils. Lucan, bringing up the party’s rear with Paelias, nocked an arrow. “I hear something down there,” he said. “More than just the wind in the plants.”

As she set foot on the gravel garden path, Biri-Daar clashed her sword on her shield. “Road-builder!” she cried out. “I, Biri-Daar, paladin of Bahamut and dragonborn of Karga Kul, call on you to come out and render unto the Knights of Kul what is rightfully ours!”

Her voice echoed in the space between the walls and up into the earth-vaulted sky above. When the echoes had died away, there was a dragonborn standing before them. None of them had seen him approach. “Biri-Daar,” he said.

She nodded. “Moula. I am here for the quill.”

The dragonborn she had called Moula stood a head taller than Biri-Daar and wore armor of lacquered indigo with the totems of the Knights of Kul etched on his shield and helm. Noting this, Biri-Daar said, “And I am also here to tell you that you are no longer welcome in Karga Kul. Exile is one possibility. If I must kill you to recover the quill, however…” She clashed sword and shield again. “I confess to my god that I might take pleasure in such a killing.”

“Careful, paladin. If you take pleasure in killing, you won’t be a paladin for long.” Moula set his sword down and tightened the straps of his shield over his forearm. “To the winner the quill,” he said, picking up his sword again.

“Perhaps I might have an opinion on that topic,” came another voice, dry and sibilant. The Road-builder emerged through a glass door in the greenhouse, closing it carefully behind him. Once he had been a strong man, and handsome. But in his undeath, rich rags draped and swept around his skeletal frame, and an inhuman light shone from the empty sockets of his skull.

“It is rare to find a group of adventurers clever and hardy enough to brave my tomb and my keep,” he said. “Welcome. Although I fear that I must not let you pass on.” He gestured around the garden, and Remy, following the gesture, saw that the garden beds were nourished by the bones of previous would-be heroes.

“Remy of Avankil,” the Road-builder said. “Philomen did not tell me to expect you.”

The vizier’s name in the lich king’s mouth struck a chill in Remy’s spine. It was the confirmation of everything Biri-Daar and Keverel had been telling him from the beginning. Instinctively Remy’s hand dropped to the pouch containing the vizier’s box, as though the Road-builder might try to pickpocket him. The Road-builder laughed. “Fear not, boy,” he said. “I will not need to take it from you. Soon enough, you will offer it to me.”

“You will never touch it,” Remy said.

The Road-builder laughed again, the sound like two stones scraping against each other. “Delightful,” he said. “One forgets so easily the bravado of the living.”

Moula laughed at that, mimicking his master. “Dog,” Biri-Daar said. “Slave of Tiamat. You turn your back on the Order.”

“I realize the destiny the Order has approached since the Solstice War,” Moula said. “Tiamat would yet accept your service, I think; though she would prefer to accept your soul.”

“Ah, the Solstice War,” said the Road-builder. “I remember it with some fondness. O hardy adventurers, you do realize that you fight the latest battle in a war that has never really ended. It was the sorcerers of Arkhosia who first sealed the portal to the Abyss that opened beneath Karga Kul, halting the advance of the demons and devils who entered into a bargain with Bael Turath… and here, today, the fate of that city will be decided. Doubt it not. You are formidable, adventurers. But even if you might survive me, you cannot survive the weight of empires. The ghosts of Arkhosia and Bael Turath still contend for the mastery of this world… and through them, the Knights of Kul came to their crisis at Iban Ja’s bridge, no? Now here we have Moula and Biri-Daar, ready to fight on for the right to claim the soul of the Order.”

Returning his attention to Remy, the Road-builder held out a hand. “Don’t,” Keverel said before the lich could speak.

“Cleric, I will have it one way or another.” The Road-builder pointed out and up, toward his greatest work. “If I could make that, do you imagine you can oppose my will now?”

Keverel drew out his holy symbol and held it high in front of him. The Road-builder dismissed him with a wave. “Now,” he said to Biri-Daar and Moula. “Perhaps the dragonborn would like to kill each other at this time, for the honor of their enemy gods?” He turned to the rest of the group and added, “I will do my best to occupy the rest of you.”

As he spoke the last words, bits of shadow began to detach themselves from the shadows among the garden beds, shaping into wispy versions of the Road-builder himself. They formed a perimeter around the garden and closed in. “Vestiges,” Remy heard Keverel say. “Don’t let them near you if you can help it. They die easily, but kill easily too.”

The clean, pure light of Erathis shone forth from his talisman as Keverel invoked the god’s protection. Kithri, long since out of throwing knives, slowly swung a sling back and forth. “Wonder if the bones of that skull will crack,” she said, and snapped off a shot. The Road-builder flicked the stone aside with a glance.

Ghosting in, the vestiges reached to apply their necrotic touch. Lucan’s arrows tore through them as if they were tissue; every strike swirled them away into dissipating smoke, but more and more of them rose. Kithri’s slung stones ricocheted from the garden walls after passing through the vestiges without resistance. A window in the greenhouse shattered. The Road-builder hissed. “Poor manners for a guest, halfling. Very poor,” he said.

From his hands poured liquid shadow that spilled across Remy and Obek. Remy smelled death, the scent of corpses… the scent of his own corpse. Dullness afflicted his legs. Obek growled a tiefling oath and struck out, slashing vestiges to shreds and leaping to land a strike on the Road-builder himself. Even approaching the lich took its toll; Obek bared his teeth against the Road-builder’s necromantic aura and struck again as black spots appeared on his flesh.

An entire quadrant of the vestiges blew away in a blast of light from Keverel’s talisman. The light flared brighter and brighter still-and steel clashed on steel as, their preliminaries out of the way, Biri-Daar and Moula came together in a pitiless battle of former friends. The traitor landed the first blow, shearing off a piece of Biri-Daar’s shield and cutting deeply into her upper arm. She shoved him back into a tangle of fleshy flowers, following with a barrage of blows that he barely held off. The flowers, sensing blood, grew excited. Their stalks stiffened and their petals reached and grasped like fingers.

But Remy could spare little attention for their duel. He pressed forward, striking at the Road-builder but finding his blows deflected by the power of his necromantic aura. It clouded the vision and the mind; only Keverel’s incantations kept them from succumbing completely. One of Lucan’s arrows struck true, opening a crack in the Road-builder’s skull. He answered with a simple gesture, two forked fingers pointed like a snake’s tongue-but something black burst silently, momentarily obscuring both Lucan and Kithri.

When it cleared, both of them lay still. There came a brief hush over the garden, a spot in time between blows and parries, shouting and the crackle of magical discharge. Into the silence came the Road-builder’s voice.

“Do you feel it, Remy? What you’ve brought me? Or should I say-what brought you?”

What brought me? Remy paused. The hesitation cost him as one of the vestiges got too close. Remy started to feel thick, started to think he heard the voices of the flowers beckoning him closer… they were spirits. They had not just grown from dead men, they were the spirits of the dead.

“Remy!”

Light blazed through the curtain falling over him-the light of Erathis, as Keverel gave himself up to the power of the god working through him. Karga Kul was Erathis’s city, one epitome of the law and progress that pleased the god. If the quill would save Karga Kul, Erathis would work through Keverel to bring it there.

The vestiges began to fall back, torn to pieces by the force of the light from Keverel’s talisman. Moula fell back before a fresh sustained attack, pivoting around and retreating in the direction of the bridge over which the party had first come to the garden. Biri-Daar pressed him; she grew more resolute and he more desperate, and at the same moment they opened their mouths and engulfed each other in flame.

Fire of another sort, black and curling and cold, spewed from the Road-builder. It brought forth a fresh cluster of vestiges. Obek struck again and again at the lich, and Remy did too, reinvigorated by the blazing Erathian light. He felt his sword bite into the Road-builder’s bones. Paelias, given a brief respite by the momentary destruction of the vestiges, returned to the battle with a fury. All of the undead plants surrounding the Road-builder uncoiled and sprouted into sinewy vines, spiked with long black thorns. Some of them caught at the lich’s robe, some his legs, some snaked up his arms. The Road-builder tore some of them free; others died the moment they came within the reach of his aura. But Paelias grew more vines, the power of the Feywild momentarily overpowering the lich’s compact with Abyssal forces. Slowly the Road-builder was overcome; slowly the sword strokes of Remy and Obek began to tell.

All of them gained strength from Biri-Daar, her paladin’s charisma bathing them in its psychic glow. With every strike at Moula, she grew stronger. Light flared more and more brightly from her sword. Behind Moula, Lucan began to stir. He got to his knees before the dragonborn traitor stumbled over him and went down, knocking Lucan down again as well. Moula landed heavily on Kithri. Lucan, long daggers in both hands, sank one of them to the hilt in a gap in Moula’s armor, behind his left shoulder. The dragonborn roared in his agony; Biri-Daar bore down and split his shield in two, severing his shield arm above the wrist.

The remaining vestiges, at a command from the Road-builder, raised their spectral arms. In the space above the Road-builder’s head, a sphere of deepest empty black appeared. The incongruity of it, seen against the pleasing highland prospect that was their sky, was suddenly to Remy almost as horrible as the necromantic sorcery of the orb itself. He thrust, and his blade jammed in the hinge of the lich’s jaw. Splinters of bone flew away from the impact as the necrotic orb hovered over toward Lucan and Biri-Daar. Paelias’s vines caught one of the Road-builder’s arms and pulled it off with a grinding crack. The Road-builder was speaking, the language long dead and sounding like death itself in Remy’s ears. Dying, Moula got to his feet one last time, knocking Lucan aside. Biri-Daar swung and he raised his maimed arm, sacrificing the rest of it to deflect the stroke.

Kithri stirred. Her face was pale, her eyes struggling to focus. One of her hands felt blindly along the gravel, looking for her sling or perhaps another weapon. Moula sank back, waving the stump of his arm trying to get his balance. Biri-Daar broke his collarbone and brought a freshet of blood from his chest with her next blow. He swung, forcing her back… and then he looked at her, the traitor regarding the avenging paladin. Moula looked at her and a sick smile spread across his face.

He turned away from her and with the last decisive action of his life, Moula ran Kithri through, driving his blade straight down into the gravel.

Biri-Daar, a split second later, struck off Moula’s head. At that exact moment, Obek and Remy hacked the unlife from the Road-builder’s body.

A split second after that, the necrotic orb fell among them and detonated in a soundless explosion that was the most violent thing Remy had ever felt.

The vines died and their creator was flung back through the greenhouse wall in a shower of glass. Lucan and Biri-Daar collapsed, and Remy toppled over backward with the bones of the Road-builder falling around him. He couldn’t focus. He couldn’t breathe. His heart skipped, stopped, then raced. Obek was driven to his knees, eyes squeezed shut against the terror that necromancy held for the renegade tiefling.

And Kithri spun away, still impaled by Moula’s sword, her body turning over and over as it fell past the Keep’s outer walls up into the sky. The last thing Remy saw was Keverel reaching vainly after her.

Consciousness slowly returned. Paelias came out of the greenhouse, bleeding from a number of superficial cuts. Lucan, looking out over the parapet, wept. Obek poked through the Road-builder’s remains with the point of his sword while Biri-Daar and Keverel headed straight for the stone structure at the end of the greenhouse. “Everyone up,” Biri-Daar commanded. “We have yet to finish this.”

“Finish this?” Obek said. “What’s to finish? The Road-builder is dead. The dragonborn is dead. Let’s get the quill and head for Karga Kul.”

“Phylactery,” Keverel said.

Paelias nodded. “Any guess about what it might look like?”

“No.” Keverel shook his head. “Often they are boxes with small slips of paper in them. But they can be anything. I will be able to tell if we find it.”

“Who cares if we find it?” Obek said. Remy had been about to ask the same thing. They followed Keverel through the greenhouse and into the Road-builder’s study, a shadowed space littered with stacks of drawings and plans, bound books and strange instruments. A single small window looked out in the direction of the keyhole, which hung like a star formation in the earthen sky.

“If we don’t find the phylactery, the Road-builder will reappear. Could be now, could be in a few days or a week. No way to tell. But I’d like to make sure that he doesn’t come back at all.” Keverel started searching, digging through the furnishings in the Road-builder’s study, picking up speed as he went. At first he looked carefully; then he began to tear the study apart. Ancient scrolls and sheaves of vellum spun to the floor, along with surveying instruments, bound books, delicate scale models of bridges, retaining walls, even the Keep itself.

“What would it look like?” Remy asked, several times, trying to get the cleric’s attention.

Keverel swept clear the top of a drafting table, splattering ink across the maps and plans he had already flung down. He stood, shaking, a cut-glass paperweight held in his hand as if it was a rock he could brain an enemy with.

“Stop,” Remy said. “It won’t bring Kithri back.” He caught the cleric’s arm. Keverel dropped the paperweight. It rolled across the floor as the keep rocked in a tremor, perhaps an echo of its keeper’s death.

Keverel looked at Remy. Then he looked down. “Your box,” he said. “The seals are broken.”

“How do you-” Remy looked down too and saw gelid light spilling upward from the pouch where he kept the box.

“The Road-builder’s death,” Keverel said. “Or the second orb. Perhaps a combination of both. The discharge of magic broke the seals.”

“Catastrophe,” Lucan said. “We were hunted before. Now we will be hunted, and all of the hunters will know where we are.” He looked around as if expecting demons to rise from the stones of the Road-builder’s garden. “The Road-builder knew of Philomen. One wonders if the vizier himself might be waiting for us when we return to the shores of the river.”

Lucan’s anxiety infected Remy, whose mind filled with imagined scenarios. Had he been meant to fall in with Biri-Daar so all of them could be delivered to the Road-builder, decapitating the Knights of Kul at the very moment the city was most endangered by the thinning of the Seal? He couldn’t know. All he could do was look back on what had happened so far and realize that if things had gone differently at any number of moments, Karga Kul would already be doomed.

If, that is, the suddenly unsealed box had not doomed the city all by itself.

Remy could remember feeling that Philomen was among the greatest citizens of Avankil, a leader of all the Dragondown Coast. Now there could be no doubt. He had not only sent Remy out into the deserts to die, he was engineering some kind of plot involving demons and the undead. “If I ever see Philomen again,” he said over the Road-builder’s bones, “I will kill him.”

Overhearing, Biri-Daar came to them. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. First we had best see what Philomen went to all this trouble for,” she said. The rest of them gathered around and Remy set the box on the cleared drafting table. The sigils, both broken and intact, glowed a deep yellow, darkening toward orange. Remy opened the box. Within, set into a velvet bed, was a chisel perhaps eight inches long, octagonal in cross-section with each face carved minutely in long strings of runes.

“Ah,” said Keverel and Biri-Daar simultaneously.

Another glow appeared from a writing desk in a corner of the study. Every head turned to see that it came from a quill in a jar. The quill was long and curling, cut from the tail feather of a phoenix and burning as brightly as if that bird was at that moment immolating itself. But it was not burning; it was aglow, fiercely, as if challenging the chisel that at that moment was rising from the box.

“Hold it, Remy,” Biri-Daar said. “Steady it.”

“No,” Keverel said, but Remy had already caught the chisel. It was hot in Remy’s hands, but not too hot. The cleric looked as if he might say something else, but he held his tongue and went to the writing desk. Gently he touched the quill and plucked it from the inkwell in which it stood. “It is as I feared,” he said softly.

“What is?” Paelias asked.

“The Road-builder’s phylactery is Moidan’s Quill,” Keverel said. “We must get to Karga Kul before he returns.”