The Seal of Karga Kul: A Dungeons & Dragons Novel (33 page)

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

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

The Mage Trust was silent.

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

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

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

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

Suddenly Remy liked him.

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

Redbeard set down his goblet. “Then—”

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

The senior guard inside the door stepped forward.

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

“I’m not a boy,” Remy said.

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

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

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

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

“Certainly,” Uliana said.

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

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

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

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

Obek nodded. “I did.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Philomen,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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