“It’s a fool’s choice,” Iriani said softly. He too could see where Biri-Daar’s thoughts had gone. “When you can tell the future, paladin of Bahamut, then you may reprimand yourself for telling it incorrectly.”
Biri-Daar looked at him, then around at the carnage. “Let us search and make sure this place is cleansed of its filth,” she said.
“And do bring back whatever you find that is both light and valuable,” Lucan added. He caught his breath as Keverel sank a needle into the meat of his shoulder. “Hurry, before this murderous cleric puts an end to me.”
“We should have such fortune,” Kithri muttered. Her voice sounded odd to Remy but he put the thought out of his mind. Biri-Daar had ordered him to clear out the back tunnels, and clear out the back tunnels he would. Keverel knew his business.
Remy found nothing in the rear tunnels, even when assisted by a cantrip of Iriani’s that set a pleasant light glowing from the buckle of his belt. Trash, bones, filth. Nothing else. He returned the way he had come, carefully, and found both Lucan and Kithri sitting up. “Time to go,” Iriani said.
“This is an awful place,” Lucan groused. “Odor enough to kill you dead, orcs and ogres nearly enough to kill you all over again…”
“… And nothing to show for it,” Kithri finished for him.
“Perhaps it is just that the two most larcenous members of our group did not participate in the search,” Biri-Daar suggested without looking at either of them. She was working with a row of damaged scales on her arm, picking loose the bits that would not heal.
Everyone else in the cave looked at one another to be sure that the paladin had in fact told a joke. They were never sure.
It was true that their search had yielded very little that was valuable, and of that virtually nothing that was light. The only thing of any value was an enormous mirror framed in what looked like silver. Iriani had found it leaning up against a dead end in one of the side tunnels. He could detect no magic in it. “Break off the frame and let’s take it with us,” Kithri said.
Everyone ignored her. Some of them did take the chance to regard the progress of their beards. Of the three who had to shave, none had since leaving Crow Fork Market. “Soon we’ll all look like dwarves,” Iriani said upon seeing himself. “Dwarves who have spent time on the rack.”
When they emerged into daylight again and found their horses cropping the brush at the edge of the river, less than two hours had passed since Remy and Lucan had cut down the two orcs snacking on the ledge. The sun was dropping toward the western peaks. “We’ve wasted the afternoon on this,” Keverel said. “None of us wants to camp so close to that nest, I would guess.”
“You would guess correctly,” Biri-Daar said. “But few of us would wish to go much farther.”
“Then over the next pass,” Lucan said.
Kithri spat from her horse. “This pass, that pass. What difference does it make?”
“Over the next pass is into the final climb toward Iban Ja’s bridge,” Lucan said. “I don’t think we’ll find any orcs or ogres up there.”
“Why not?” Remy asked.
“The cambions and hobgoblins scare them away. Or slaughter them,” Iriani said.
Nodding, Lucan added, “That’s if the sorrowsworn don’t get them first.”
“Sorrowsworn?” Remy had never heard the name. Or term.
“Perhaps you will have the good fortune not to find out,” Iriani said. Nobody would say anything else about it. They rode on, and camped beyond the next pass, alighting from their horses just as the last of the sun vanished behind the mountains, its dying rays slanting up into the sky.
As it turned out, they did not reach Iban Ja’s bridge until the second day after they cleaned out the lair of orcs. Biri-Daar was reluctant to push the pace while Kithri and Lucan were recovering from their wounds. When they did come to the bridge, Remy realized that everything he had heard about it-and by that time he had heard quite a lot-had utterly failed to prepare him for the reality of seeing it for himself.
They had just stopped for lunch at the head of a slot canyon through which the road angled down, following the canyon floor. Already Remy could hear a distant roar, but despite what Biri-Daar and Lucan said, he could not believe that was the sound of a tributary river to the Blackfall, rumbling from the bottom of a gorge said to be a thousand feet deep. “What is it really?” he asked with an uncertain smile. They shook their heads and said if he didn’t believe them, he would just have to see for himself.
Which now he was.
The road ended in a tumble of scree that fell a few dozen yards to the lip of the gorge itself. Remy couldn’t see its bottom from where they stood. Around them reared up impassable walls of stone, with the narrowest of ledges on the left side of the scree.
And ahead of them, hanging impossibly in the empty air, was the Bridge of Iban Ja. Remy tried to count the stones, but could not. Some of them were larger than the house where he had last taken a meal in Avankil. Some were no larger than a man. Gathered together, they were a mosaic impression of a bridge, the gaps between them sometimes narrow enough for a halfling to tiptoe across and sometimes wide enough that no sane mortal would endeavor the jump without wings. Bits of cloth on sticks fluttered from cracks in some of the rocks, the guideposts of long-past travelers. All of the stones moved slightly, rocking in the winds that howled through the Gorge of Noon as if they floated on the surface of a gentled ocean, or a wide and flat stretch of river. Snow clung to some of them, and drifted in sculpted shapes across the flat edges of others.
“Well,” Kithri said, “now we’ve seen it. Biri-Daar, what did you say the other way across this gorge was?”
“It involves traveling fifty leagues off the road to a ford,” Biri-Daar said. “We have no time. I have crossed Iban Ja’s bridge before. It held me. It will hold you.”
“And by this point, crossing it is no longer a matter of choice,” Keverel chimed in.
“Is that so,” Kithri began. She saw Keverel pointing back up the road, turned to see what he was indicating, and saw-as Remy did at that exact moment-the band of tieflings standing in the road behind them. As they watched, the band of perhaps a dozen was fortified with ten times as many hobgoblin marauders.
Remy had seen fewer tieflings than dragonborn. The dragonborn in Avankil had their clan hall, and conducted business when they had business to conduct. The city’s tieflings, perhaps sensitive to the permanent stain on their heritage, kept to themselves when they could. When they dealt with non-tieflings, their bravado and short tempers resulted in vexed interactions. Everyone Remy had ever known, from Quayside toughs to Philomen the vizier himself, had warned him to steer clear of tieflings.
Now here he was, his back to a pathway of rocks floating in midair, facing a large number of exactly those creatures he had been told his entire life to avoid. Remy touched the box hanging at his side and wondered what it might have contributed to this turn of events. He imagined that, if they survived the next hour, Lucan and the others might have similar questions.
“It seems that some of these tieflings still believe they fight for Bael Turath,” Lucan observed.
“And that we, somehow, wear the colors of Arkhosia,” Kithri added. “Well, we do have a dragonborn with us.”
“It gets worse,” Lucan said.
“I can hardly see how,” Kithri said.
“I can,” Iriani said. “Out there on the bridge, see that? That is a cambion magus.”
Something about his tone struck up a quiet, creeping fear in Remy’s mind. Iriani, who had faced down everything they had seen thus far without batting an eye, now paused. “Devil’s offspring,” Iriani said. “You must not speak to it. These magi have the gift of deceit. They would talk any of you right off the bridge.”
“You’re assuming any of us are going on the bridge,” Kithri said. She was up on a rock at the very edge of the cliff, looking down into the gorge. “If,” she added, “you can call it a bridge. Whoever named it, I’m guessing, had never laid eyes on it.”