The Seal of Karga Kul: A Dungeons & Dragons Novel (22 page)

“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.