The Seal of Karga Kul: A Dungeons & Dragons Novel (36 page)

“You did not have all the luck,” Philomen said. “Boy.”

Wordlessly Remy ran him through, leaving his sword where it stood at an angle out from the ribs of the desiccated corpse of the man who had given Remy his first job. But that was when he had still been a boy. He looked around. “Lucan,” he said.

The elf was kicking over the corpses of demons and killing whichever of them stirred. “Remy.”

“Where’s Obek?”

“Here,” came the tiefling’s voice from the other side of the Seal. “Who do you think kept pushing when you were out on the carousel there?” Obek came into view—their light was much diminished, and Remy could barely see him until Keverel, his voice hoarse with exhaustion, invoked the name of his god one last time, the word Erathis spreading through the chamber, bringing light to the shadows.

“Philomen,” Keverel mused. “Vizier of Avankil.” He walked to the vizier’s body, rolled the staff along the floor with his foot, prodded the many sashes and pouches of the vizier’s robe. “It is a very dark day. Biri-Daar was the greatest of the Knights of Kul. Her memory may yet restore the order
to the greatness that is its rightful legacy.” The cleric’s gaze roved over the carnage in the Chamber of the Seal, and came to rest on the Seal itself. “This is now the tomb of Biri-Daar,” he said. “Though few will ever see it.” He made a gesture of blessing over the seal, and it seemed incongruous to Remy, who had seen what lay beneath the floor.

Keverel saw him looking, and must have read the expression on Remy’s face. “Blessings are not for those places that are already holy,” he said. “Surely you have learned this now.”

“Learning,” Obek said. “I am sick of learning. Let us go away from this place to somewhere else, a place where there is nothing to learn.”

The four of them were coming closer to each other, not intending it so but under the power of an impulse to draw together, the four survivors of a journey long and treacherous. “You did well, tiefling,” Lucan said.

“Oh, praise from the elf,” Obek said. He looked at the Seal and at the body of Paelias. “None of us did well enough.”

“But we did,” Keverel said. “Karga Kul stands, and will stand. That, at least, we have done.”

They were quiet for a long while after that, in the glow of Erathis that silvered the bodies of the living and the dead.

T
he sun on the Dragondown Gulf did as much as anything could to dispel the memories of what had happened inside the cliff. Remy looked up from Cliff Quay. “It’s time to leave this place for a while. There will be unrest in the absence of power,” he said. “The Mage Trust is dead. The seal is restored. Enemies remain. Our victory is partial.”

On Remy’s other side, Obek and Lucan leaned against the railing of a pier, looking not up at the city but down at the ship they were about to board. They were paying in gold for their passage south to the Cape of Toradan, where the city of that name still stood looking out over the waters of the Dragondown Gulf. Remy considered that he had seen two of the Five Cities. Toradan would be the third, Toradan whose native sailor sang to raise a wind to bring them home more quickly:

Remy regarded the gold-filigreed fragment of eggshell in his palm. He had it from a paladin of Bahamut, one of the great leaders of the Order of the Knights of Kul. He shook out the chain and looked at the broken links. Any jeweler in Toradan would be able to repair it. The boat rocked and groaned in rhythm with the swells on the outer Cape Kul, and Remy turned his mind forward, to Toradan. Avankil would no longer be safe for him. Like Biri-Daar, perhaps, he was growing into a citizen of the Dragondown; all of this land’s mystery, wonder, and danger were his to explore.

Philomen’s agents survived—in Avankil, and Toradan, and in the Monastery of the Cliff. The threats that lay below and behind the visible world were still dangerous. But where there were threats, there was adventure. And glory.

And, of course, the treasures of lost civilizations whose remains were everywhere … if one knew how to look. Remy saw Obek and Lucan gambling with another pair of passengers, and Keverel looking out over the bow into the limitless reaches of the gulf beyond the harbors. These three, and four more who had died along the way, had begun to teach Remy to see.

The world would yet teach him more.

The coffers of Karga Kul had produced a handsome price in gemstones for the staff of Philomen. The vizier’s other treasures included a ring Remy wore on his right hand
index finger. Lucan said it was a ring that brought luck. Remy thought that he had seen how luck operated in the last moments of Paelias’s life, and wasn’t sure he wanted more luck around. He’d always survived with the luck he’d been born with.

But the ring was his, and in the pouch where he had carried the chisel, next to Biri-Daar’s gilded eggshell, Remy carried a drawstring bag filled with more money than he had ever seen in one place in his life. His first impulse when Lucan had given him his share had been to give it back, to say that the lives of his comrades were not worth gems and gold.

Lucan had seen the argument brewing in Remy’s eyes. “Remy,” he’d said. “It never was a trade. You don’t get to choose one or the other.”

And Remy had taken the treasure. Kithri, Iriani, Paelias, Biri-Daar … I only knew them a few days, or weeks, Remy thought. Yet they will be more alive to me in my memory than anyone I knew in Avankil. This was what destiny felt like, he decided. When everything around you—every sensation and experience and memory and expection—when all of it was more real than anything you’d ever felt, that was destiny. That was how you knew you were walking the path your life had laid out for you.

Remy would walk the path. He jingled the pouch. He would learn to experience sadness and the thrill of victory at the same time. Over his head, the sailors sang, and the ship turned south away from the Quay of the Cliff, heading for open water and the towers of Toradan.

Alex Irvine is the award-winning author of five original novels including
Buyout
and
The Narrows
, two short story collections, and several shared-world and media-related projects, such as
Batman: Inferno
and
The Vertigo Encyclopedia
. His comics work includes
Daredevil Noir, Iron Man: The Rapture
, and
Dark Sun: Ianto’s Tomb
. He has worked as a reporter for the
Portland Phoenix
, and was part of the writing teams for the ground-breaking ARGs
The Beast
and
I Love Bees
. He lives in Maine.

As with all stories that deal with the ancient past, tales about the birth of the dragonborn are hazy in their details and often contradict one another. Each tale, though, reveals something about the dragonborn that is true, regardless of the historical accuracy of the legend—and it often reveals much about the teller.

One tale relates that the dragonborn were shaped by Io even as the ancient dragon-god created dragons. In the beginning of days, this legend says, Io fused brilliant astral spirits with the unchecked fury of the raw elements. The greater spirits became the dragons, creatures so powerful, proud, and strong-willed that they were lords of the newborn world. The lesser spirits became the dragonborn. Although smaller in stature than their mighty lords, they were no less draconic in nature.

This tale stresses the close kinship between dragons and dragonborn, while reinforcing the natural order of things—dragons rule, dragonborn serve.

A second legend claims that Io created the dragons separately, at the birth of the world. Io crafted them lovingly to represent the pinnacle of mortal form, imbuing them with the power of the Elemental Chaos flowing through their veins and spewing forth from their mouths in gouts of flame or waves of paralyzing cold. Io granted them the keen minds and lofty spirits shared by other mortal races, linking them to Io and to the other gods of the Astral Sea.

During the Dawn War, however, Io was killed by the primordial known as Erek-Hus, the King of Terror. With a rough-hewn axe of adamantine, the King of Terror split Io from head to tail, cleaving the dragongod into two equal halves. No sooner did Io’s sundered corpse fall to the ground than each half rose up as a new god—Bahamut from the left and Tiamat from the right. Drops of Io’s blood, spread far and wide across the world, rose up as dragonborn.

This tale separates the creation of dragonborn from the birth of the dragons, implying that they are fundamentally separate. Sometimes, those who repeat this legend suggest that dragonborn are clearly less than the dragons made by Io’s loving hand. Other tellers, though, stress that the dragonborn rose up from Io’s own blood—just as the two draconic deities arose from the god’s severed body. Are they not, therefore, this tale asks, like the gods themselves?

A third legend, rarely told in current times, claims that dragonborn were the firstborn of the world, created before dragons and before other humanoid races. Those other races were made, the legend claims, in pale imitation of dragonborn perfection. Io shaped the dragonborn with his great claws and fired them with his breath, then spilled some of his own blood to send life coursing through their veins. Io made the dragonborn, the legend says, to be companions and allies, to fill his astral court and sing his praise. The dragons he made later, at the start of the Dawn War, to serve as engines of destruction.

This version of the tale was popular during the height of the Empire of Arkhosia, though it was subversive at the time—it proclaimed that dragonborn should be the masters of dragons and not the other way around. It also highlighted the superiority of dragonborn to other races, which was a common theme in the rhetoric of ancient Arkhosia.

One common theme binds all these legends together, though—the dragonborn owe their existence, in some fundamental way, to Io, the great dragon-god who created all of dragonkind. The dragonborn, all legends agree, are not the creation of Bahamut or Tiamat—their origin does not naturally place them on one side or the other of the ancient conflict between those gods. Therefore, it’s up to every individual dragonborn to choose sides in the eternal struggle between the chromatic and metallic dragons—or to ignore this conflict completely and find their own way in the world.

The common people of most races are unaligned, with few making a conscious effort to choose a good life or an evil one. Dragonborn, however, are much more likely to choose sides in the cosmic war between good and evil. Dragonborn often tell the story of Io’s death and the birth of Bahamut and Tiamat as a moral tale intended to emphasize the importance of standing on one side or the other.

“Io didn’t die so we could stand in the middle,” they say. “We’re not called to ambivalence. The choices stand before you—Bahamut’s way or Tiamat’s. The only wrong decision is refusing to choose.”

Of course, more dragonborn choose Bahamut’s path than Tiamat’s. The pathways of justice, honor, nobility, and protection are more conducive to society’s smooth functioning than those of greed, envy, and vengeance. Those who follow Tiamat’s ways usually keep their choice quiet, worshiping the Chromatic Dragon in secret shrines while going through the motions of fulfilling social expectations.

Choosing sides isn’t just a matter of a one-time choice of alignment, however. Every moment of crisis calls for a decision, and dragonborn are inclined to see those decisions as a matter of stark extremes. When wronged, a dragonborn can choose the path of Bahamut and seek to bring the wrongdoer to justice. Or the victim might choose the path of Tiamat and swear vengeance. Even good-aligned dragonborn who are devoted to Bahamut sometimes choose the
latter path—not out of impulsive rage, but because it’s the best course to take in that particular situation.

A few dragonborn reject the idea of choosing between Bahamut’s way and Tiamat’s, notably the followers of the Temple of Io’s Children. These dragonborn are often unaligned, but their position is a decision not to choose sides, rather than a sign of ambivalence. They view the distinction between the gods as a false dichotomy, a choice between two sides of the same coin, not really different from each other.

This disdain for ambivalence extends beyond choosing alignment. While dragonborn appreciate the virtue of listening to both sides of an argument, they don’t respect anyone who hears both sides and can’t choose between them. Decisiveness is a mark of strong character.

This attitude makes compromise more difficult for dragonborn to reach or accept than it is for other races, but not impossible. In fact, sometimes dragonborn reach compromise all the more quickly because they realize that each side is committed to its own position and won’t be persuaded to alter its perspective, making some kind of compromise the only possible solution.