The Seal of Karga Kul: A Dungeons & Dragons Novel (6 page)

“Or dragonborn,” Kithri added cheerfully.

“The propensity for foolishness knows no racial boundaries,” Keverel commented. “Shall we eat?”

The area immediately inside the gates of Crow Fork Market was reserved for the staging of caravans and merchant missions. From there, grooms took their horses and walked them along the wall toward the stables that were set away from the main bazaar spaces. To the left and right were rows of stalls offering every kind of foodstuff found within three months’ journey. These stalls were hotly contested, and handed down across generations. Few things in commerce were certain, but one of those few certainties was that a caravan arriving was hungry and a caravan leaving thought it might be. In both cases, food was desirable.

Remy ate skewers of fried squid from the Furia coast, where the waters were deep and wracked with storms. He washed them down with a strong tea chilled by ice brought down from the glaciers high in the Draco Serrata. It was said that some of those glaciers contained the preserved bodies of warriors and mages from the age of Arkhosia, and that so powerful was their magic that when the ice melted from around them they walked and breathed as if they had never spent frozen millennia beneath the alpine stars. There were those who believed that ice from those glaciers had healing properties, as did the water that remained when the ice melted. Remy didn’t know about that, but he would willingly have stated that the tea itself had restorative properties after ten days spent in the wastes.

Tieflings down from the mountains mixed with their ancient adversaries, the dragonborn; members of warring nations and clans haggled over the same goods; zealot and unbeliever poured and drank from the same tankards. Crow Fork Market, by tradition and decree, was a place where the only permissible violence was that done to a customer’s purse.

Spiretop drakes flitted from the gate towers and nestled under the eaves of the keep at the center of the market. They were an irritating scourge of some cities, threatening unlucky citizens and stealing anything shiny that caught their attention. In Avankil, Remy had earned bounties from the Quayside neighborhood constabulary for killing spiretops. It was how he had learned to use a sling. They were the rats of the air, only smarter and more vicious than rats. Remy was tempted to take a shot at them now. Instead he sipped his tea and crunched the last of the fried squid, spitting their beaks onto the stones. “All of this came from somewhere else,” he marveled.

“Most of it, yes,” Iriani said. He was rebraiding his hair and pausing every time he finished a braid to take a swallow of distilled liquor from a bottle he’d bought the minute they came through the gate. “When this place was founded, the stories go, all they had to work with was rocks and sand.”

He turned to Remy. “So. Are you staying with us?”

Remy blinked. His conversation with Biri-Daar the night before had unsettled him. On the one hand, he felt that of course he would go with them; they had saved his life. On the other, he had an errand to complete.

On a third hand rested the questions Biri-Daar had raised.

“No,” he said. “I will buy a horse and go to Toradan. I committed to this errand.”

“Let him go,” Lucan said.

Keverel took a swallow of Iriani’s liquor. “Lucan, bury your grudge,” he said. “It is no right act to let a boy go off and die out of an overdeveloped sense of obligation.”

“I am not a boy,” Remy said. “You didn’t think I was a boy when I fought with you.”

Iriani laughed. “As a matter of fact, we did. You fought as a boy fights, all arm and no brain. But that’s good. At least you have the strength in your arm. The brain for the fight comes later.”

“Where are you going to get money for a horse?” Kithri asked, eyes wide and expression so serious that Remy knew he was being mocked. “If you leave now, you aren’t entitled to a share of the spoils.”

Remy couldn’t quite tell if she was serious about this. “That is the code,” Keverel said. “But surely we could make an allowance given the circumstances.”

“Ha! The boy who called me a coward is finding his own cowardice,” Lucan said. “At least that’s what it seems like to me.”

Coming from Lucan, this stung. Remy bit back his first reply and considered the situation anew. “Biri-Daar,” he said. “Do you still think that—?”

“Yes,” she said. “If you go into the wastes alone, you will not survive to reach Toradan. And if you do, you will not leave Toradan alive. Bahamut has brought us together.
Keverel would say Erathis. I believe we should show your box to the Mage Trust at Karga Kul. We can trust them, and their magic is powerful enough to discover what lies inside.”

“So he draws demon’s eyes and we’re going to invite him along,” Lucan said. “Biri-Daar, one of these days you’re going to take in a stray and get us all killed.”

“I would sooner die doing the right thing than live an extra day because I failed what I know to be right,” Biri-Daar said. “Remy, I will say it again. The gods have brought us together.”

Remy’s childhood had not featured much in the way of devotion to gods. His mother was a quiet worshiper of Pelor, in the way that many citizens of Avankil whose recent ancestors had come in from the fields still followed that god of harvests and summer. Her devotion had become perfunctory, a matter of occasional holiday sprigs and leonine sunburst emblems stitched into the hems of the tunics she made. In the Quayside, religions mixed and turned into a kind of hybrid river creed, a constant barrage of hand gestures and muttered oaths, holy symbols and superstitious stories told over tankards of ale. Remy had soaked it all in without ever developing a firm idea of which god he would follow.

Even so, Biri-Daar’s idea that the gods had brought him together with her party gave Remy pause. He had been on the brink of death, and now he lived, thanks to a dragonborn paladin of Bahamut and the healing magic of the Erathian Keverel. Something greater than Remy was at work here … and he feared that Biri-Daar’s dark assessment of his mission
was correct. Why had the demon’s eye been keyed to look for him? What was it he carried?

Remy was brave but not a fool. He did not want to die as a pawn in another man’s game.

He looked around. Every race that made a home in the Dragondown was here, selling everything that could be grown, made, or built—by hands or magic.

“Have an apple,” Iriani said, tossing him one. Remy caught it and bit into it.

It was beginning to seem as if they were commanding him to come along, and that feeling made Remy resist even though he was starting to think accompanying them to Karga Kul was the best way forward. He didn’t want to be forced into it, though. “I’ll stay with you,” he said, meaning
until I figure out what’s going on
. “If you can lend me the money for a horse.”

“No lending necessary,” said Biri-Daar. She was eating what looked like an entire pig’s leg and had a new pair of katars thrust in her belt. “We’ll sell these things off,” she added, jingling the pouch containing the dead gnolls’ trinkets, “and you can buy a horse with your share.”

First they found a jeweler who would take the ring, armband, and earring. It was simply done, and when Kithri’s bartering skills faltered, the presence of Biri-Daar ensured a fair bargain. Then they wound their way deeper into the market, toward the shadowed older districts where layers of buildings were built upon each other, leaning in to block out the sun
as the streets narrowed to alleys that approached the market keep from furtive angles. It was where magic was dealt and the spiretop drakes were as likely to be carrying messages as stealing coins from the counters of market stalls.

Iriani had done business with a broker of potions and talismans there before. They found him smoking a pipe outside his shop, frowning up as if the shadows of the buildings’ upper stories over his head contained some bit of occult wisdom just beyond his understanding. “Roji,” Iriani greeted him.

He turned to notice Iriani and winked. “What have you found in your peregrinations across this fine land of ours, my elf friend?”

On the way there, Biri-Daar had handed off the jawbone and demon’s eye to Iriani. She stood close as the half-elf suggested they go inside and chat. “Not every bit of business needs to take place where everyone can see.”

“Fine,” Roji said. He knocked his pipe out and pulled back the curtain across his doorway. “But most of you have to stay outside. None of us will be able to breathe if you all come in. The dragonborn is too big, the halfling will steal everything she can see. I don’t like holy men. So the ranger and the boy can come in.”

Iriani grinned. “It’s settled, then. Remy? Lucan? After you.”

The three of them followed Roji into his shop. They sat on cushions around a low table. “What do you have?” Roji asked. “And why so worried about who might see? This is Crow Fork. Nothing will happen to you here.”

“Something might happen to us as soon as we leave,” Iriani said. “We would prefer to be sure.”

“Sure,” Roji chuckled. “What is sure? Let me see what you’ve brought.”

He looked over the jawbone, tapping on each of the teeth. “Interesting,” he said. “Not the kind of thing I usually traffic in, but I know what I can do with it. Was that it?”

“No,” Iriani said. “This piece is a bit different.” He handed Roji the demon’s eye and watched as the merchant figured out what it was.

With a sharp breath, Roji set it down. “Gods,” he said. “Why didn’t you destroy it?”

“No way to be sure what would happen,” Lucan said. “We know you can make something out of it, and Iriani said we could trust you not to let it find its way back to the wrong hands.”

“Where did you find it?”

“Around the neck of a cacklefiend a day’s ride east,” Iriani said.

“And who put it there?”

“I haven’t tried to find out. You may if you choose. What we want is to get rid of it and make sure it stays gone.” Iriani leaned forward over the table. “Roji, I know you know what to do with things like this.”

“You also know that whatever I do with it, its builder will know it was I who did it,” Roji said.

“I have blinded it temporarily,” Iriani said. “Act quickly and escape consequence. That’s your way in any case, is it not?”

Roji didn’t look inclined to laugh. “What gives you the right to ask this of me?”

“No right. But you can turn it into a mirror, can’t you?”

A mirror? Remy didn’t know what he meant. He had very little idea of what the conversation was about. Why didn’t they just sell what they had to sell and get out of this cramped little space with its shelves of skulls and beakers, its racks of wands and staves imbued with various enchantments …

“A mirror,” Roji repeated. “That might be useful.” Thinking it over, he said, “I’ll take it. But you might as well know that this isn’t the only eye looking for him.” He nodded in Remy’s direction.

A cold knot formed in Remy’s stomach. “How—”

“Hush,” Roji said. “It’s there for anyone to see. You’ve got something that people want, and some of its magic has bled onto you. Anyone on this street would be able to see it. Iriani, this one is going to cause you trouble.”

“I believe that opinion has been expressed,” Lucan said coolly. “But it appears to be of no concern to those whose opinions matter.”

“There is much about his errand that we do not yet understand. Even so, Biri-Daar and Keverel feel—and I agree—that something beyond chance was at work when we ran across the boy in the wastes.” Iriani looked at Remy. “Show him what you carry,” he said.

Instinctively Remy shook his head. “No.”

“I’m not saying give it to him, Remy. Show it to him. He’ll tell us something we need to know.”

“You can count on that,” Roji said. “Even though you ought to be paying me both for taking the demon’s eye and looking at whatever the boy has. Now come, boy. Show it.”

Remy placed the box on the table but kept his hands close to it. Roji leaned over it and looked closely at the sigils on the lid. He waved a hand over it, his fingers making the familiar sign of a magic-detecting spell. “We already know it’s magic,” Lucan said.

“I know what you say you know,” Roji said without looking at him. “I’m trying to figure out what you don’t know you don’t know, if you know what I mean.… Ah. Remy, do me a favor and touch the box.”

Remy did. “Why?”

“One of the sigils on it, unless I’m mistaken, is an alarm. Whenever the box leaves your possession, someone somewhere knows about it.” He made another pass over the box and the sigils glowed a soft red. “That one there,” Iriani said, pointing at a corner of the box.

“I know,” Roji said. “This box has a powerful maker, to invoke her.”

“Invoke who?” Remy asked.

Roji and Iriani looked at each other. Then Iriani glanced over at Remy. “Tiamat,” he said. “I had thought so before, but now am sure. We will need to tell Biri-Daar of this.” Iriani rapped his knuckles on the table, the old elf invocation of good luck. “Remy, Lucan, I think Roji and I should finish our transaction in private.”