He heard the muted clop of horses’ hooves on hard earth. The road from Avankil to Toradan-the road at whose side Remy would shortly die-was laid down of stones cut flat and placed so that in most places a knife blade would not slip between them. Hooves made a different sound there. Someone was riding off the road.
To me, Remy thought. Someone is riding to help.
“Stormclaw scorpions.” The voice drifted down through the veils of Remy’s fever. He tried to answer but could not.
“The horse is dead.”
“Notice that, did you?”
Something prodded Remy’s hip. “This one isn’t, though, I don’t think.” That voice came closer. Remy vomited and tried to speak as several voices joined in rough laughter.
“Not quite. Got some life left in him.”
“Late. Maybe we should camp anyway, see if he makes it through the night.”
“And then what?” The voices blurred together, too fast for Remy to follow. The last clear thing he heard was, “We should leave him.”
He dreamed in his fever of catching fish in the shadowed water under the wharves. Sometimes when one of the wizards or alchemists of Avankil disposed of failed elixirs, remnant trickles found their way to those slack waters, producing monstrosities. Once Remy had caught a fish with tiny hands. He had been about to throw it back when a passing woman, her face hooded by a dark cloak embroidered with the constellations of summer, bought it from him for thirty pieces of gold. It was that money Remy had used to buy his first short sword, an unadorned blade whose hilt Remy had re-wrapped with wire and leather scavenged from dockside rubbish heaps. He had enough left over for a month of lessons with one of the drillmasters who trained the garrisons of the keep. He had taken to wearing the sword, but not everywhere. Avankil had laws about which of its citizens could be armed and when. Remy had no desire to break them, and no desire to provoke random belligerents who might swagger across his path from the docks or the Ferry Gate.
Despite his discretion, he had crossed swords more than once and had killed a man the year before. A drifting sword for hire, killing time on the Quayside, had seen Remy receive a message and a few coins. Catching up with Remy in one of the twisting alleys between Quayside and the downstream terminus of the Outer Wall, he had left Remy no choice. Since then Remy had moved with more caution through streets he had once thought he owned. When he was a boy, he was just one more boy flitting through the streets of Avankil; as he became a man, he attracted more notice.
Once a year, perhaps, he found some oddity dangling from his hook. Some of them died as soon as he brought them up. Some frightened him enough to drop the whole line into the water. Some were pathetic, freakish, fit only for an afterlife suspended in amber fluid on the top shelf of some distracted alchemist’s study. All of them were mysteries Remy didn’t particularly want to solve.
What’s in the box?
“No,” Remy moaned. “Don’t.”
The vizier had warned him. If you open the box-if you so much as crack the seal that holds it shut-you might not die, but you will wish you had. And if you don’t die from what the box contains, you most certainly will when I find you again. You are a good messenger, Remy. Do not disappoint me in this.
With that, the vizier Philomen had disappeared through the curtains into his inner chambers, leaving Remy with the box he dared not open and a letter to present at the stable just inside the Undergate, in return for which he would be given a horse. Toradan was a week’s ride. Perhaps ten days if he made excellent time and encountered no trouble along the way.
Remy woke to the smell of stew. The odor of cooking fat hooked him and hauled him up from the depths of his fever into waking life. He shivered and opened his eyes, confused at first by the angle of the sun. Long shadows lay across the wastes and behind he heard conversation in low voices. He rolled over, legs tangled in a blanket that was not his. He blinked the sleep from his eyes and pinpointed where the voices where coming from.
Like most residents of Avankil-or any of the settlements along the Dragondown Coast-Remy had only seen a few dragonborn. They kept to themselves, by and large, and their travels-for the dragonborn were a rootless and wandering race-tended to pause only in the company of other dragonborn. From time to time, Remy had seen them on board ships that docked Quayside. Once he had run a message from one such seafarer to the dragonborn clan enclave upstream of Quayside, near the Outer Wall in the oldest quarter of Avankil. On the whole, dragonborn didn’t spend much time in the settled coastal cities, preferring to spend their time in places more likely to yield adventure.
And there was one-a female, no less, armed and armored-stirring a small pot over a campfire off the road between Avankil and Toradan. She looked over at the motion and said, “Ah. So you did live. Praise to Bahamut.”
“Or to Keverel’s medicines,” cut in a halfling woman sitting at the dragonborn’s left. She nodded at a human wearing the holy symbol of Erathis and the sunburn of someone who spent most of his time under a roof.
“The cleric is honest in his worship. Bahamut does not consider the followers of Erathis enemies of the Law,” the dragonborn returned. “Be flip about something else, Kithri.”
The halfling stood and somersaulted backward. “I am flip,” she announced, and went over to Remy. “So. I’m Kithri.” Pointing at each member of the party in turn, she introduced them. “The humorless dragonborn there is Biri-Daar. Keverel there saved your life with his clerical ministrations. He and Biri-Daar will bore you to death with their notions about Bahamut and Erathis. You ask me, there’s not much difference between a god of civilization and law and a divine dragon dedicated to justice and honor. The sourpuss with the bow is Lucan, and the quiet one in the wizard’s cloak is Iriani.”
She squatted and tapped Remy on the shoulder. “Now you know us. Here’s what we know about you. You were traveling from Avankil. You were attacked by stormclaw scorpions. You killed several of them. After they killed your horse and you slipped into your fever, something else came along and ate the horse.”
“You should feel lucky it didn’t eat you,” Lucan said from the other side of the campfire. He was an elf. His dress, leathers, and muted colors marked him as a ranger with long experience in the trackless wilderness of the Dragondown. Iriani, sitting quietly at the edge of the campfire’s light, also had the elongated, angular features that bespoke elf blood, but his aspect was more human. A half-elf, Remy thought. They were known to be drawn to the magical arts. Iriani had acknowledged Kithri’s introduction with a nod in Remy’s direction but had not yet spoken.
Already it was brighter, the shadows were shorter, and Remy realized with a shock that it was not evening but morning. He sat up and thought that he might attempt to get to his feet.
“How long have I been…?”
“Before we came along, who knows?” Kithri said. “A day, probably. And another half day since we found you. Probably other travelers passed during that time but didn’t think you had anything worth taking.”
“She and I disagree about that,” Lucan said.
“Lucan and I disagree about everything,” Kithri said. “It passes the time.”
“If there are stormclaws around, probably there’s a ruin nearby,” added the cleric Keverel. “They tend to congregate in such places. I believe this road dates from the times of Bael Turath, before the great war. There could have been an outpost…” He trailed off, looking around. “The land reclaims what the higher races abandon.”