No one spoke.
“Perfect,” Paelias said. “Then we should ride. It’s a long way to the Inverted Keep, and this Crow Road has us all at each other’s throats. Remember that.”
Several uneventful days passed, enlivened only by bickering. Then, one afternoon, Biri-Daar dropped back from her customary position at the front of the group. When she was next to Remy, she said, “So. I have told you part of why we must go to Karga Kul. Would you like to hear the rest?”
Looking straight ahead, Remy nodded. “Yes, I would,” he said.
Karga Kul! Where demons fear to tread…
When the Crow Road was built, Karga Kul was there. When Arkhosia and Bael Turath destroyed each other in blood and sorcery and the smoke of sacked cities, Karga Kul was there. Its scholars claim seven cities have risen on the great cliff where the Whitefall meets the sea, and seven times seven languages have been spoken in the halls of its keep, and seven times seven times seven rooms are built below the lowest level in a dungeon from whose furthest corners one can step, incredibly, up into the Underdark.
And in one of those seven times seven times seven rooms is a door that leads nowhere on the mortal plane. This door is bound in iron, its hinges ruined with acid, molten lead poured into the cracks and the magical sigils of seven civilizations inscribed into the lead.
Over all of this, forming an unbreakable barrier, is the eldritch Seal of Karga Kul.
If any man or woman knows who put the seal on that door, the story has never been told, or it has been lost over the centuries. What is known is that on the other side waits Doresain, the Exarch of the Demon Prince Orcus. For a century of centuries he has waited for that door to open. His demonic allies and underlings wait with him: the apelike barlgura, insectoid mezzodemon, avian vrock and great pincered glabrezu, six-armed marilith with the serpent’s tail. The Abyssal chamber where Doresain held his watch was lit by the infernal glare of the immolith, and the hulks of goristro muscled smaller demons out of the way along the walls.
Somewhere in the world, it was said, secret cults worshiped Orcus. The most dedicated of these cults spawned powerful death priests, anointed by Orcus himself and given power over men’s dreams. These cults work to open gateways between the Abyss and the mortal realms; their methods are assassination, infiltration, seduction… rarely do they show themselves. Karga Kul is their greatest prize, and the one they have never gained. Other armies have marched on Karga Kul, and broken on its walls. Never has the seal been broken, and never have the demons of the Abyss been unleashed to ravage the city from the inside, and, with it destroyed, spill into the mortal world.
Periodically the seal grows weak, and must be reinscribed. The quill that may inscribe the seal is kept far away, in a location known only to the Knights of Kul, the dragonborn elite given the Duty of Moidan’s Quill after the great victory at the Bridge of Iban Ja…
“That’s you, isn’t it?” Remy said.
Biri-Daar nodded. “Me, and my ancestors stretching back perhaps a hundred generations. I am given a most sacred trust.”
“We have the quill now?”
“No.” Biri-Daar looked out over the Crow Road, where shapes danced in the gloaming as the sun fell into the mountains behind them and the sky darkened through violet and toward black in the distance ahead. “Moidan’s Quill was first held by Bahamut himself. He inscribed the symbols that hold the Abyss bottled in the bowels of the dungeons below Karga Kul. Never have the dragonborn guardians of the quill failed to present it when the seal grew faint and needed reinscription. I will not be the first.”
Remy worked out in his head what he was already assuming to be the truth. “It’s in the Inverted Keep.”
“Yes,” Biri-Daar said. “It’s in the Inverted Keep.”
“How did the Inverted Keep get… inverted?” Remy asked. Also he wanted to ask what were those shapes dancing at the edge of the darkness ahead of them, but they were far enough not to worry about just yet… and in any case could be just illusions born of the road’s bizarre origins… and the story Biri-Daar told was too fascinating. Remy couldn’t imagine listening to anything else…
There was a jerk around his waist, and Remy flew off his horse and hit the ground hard. The impact jarred something loose in his shoulder, and also in his mind. He had been ensorcelled! Something…
The thing wrapped around his waist was a vine. Remy dug his heels into the earth and found his knife. He slashed at the vine until it snapped, and fell backward against the embankment of the Crow Road.
Suddenly the earth around him was alive with the vines-no, they were roots. And one of the great old trees at the edge of the road was moving. “Treant!” shouted Lucan. “A blackroot!”
Treants, those legendary guardians of the forests, were as vulnerable as other kinds of life to the undead transformations that occurred along the Crow Road. This one moved with the sound of crackling bark and the whisper of long-dead leaves that did not fall from its branches. The roots binding Remy dragged him toward it. “Behind it,” he called out as the rest of the group leaped off their horses. “There’s something behind it!”
From either side of the treant, sword wraiths appeared, their blades catching the moonlight. Remy struggled to draw his own sword but his arm was bound fast. All he could do was saw with his knife at the roots that drew him ever closer to the treant’s great fists, which would pound him into a bloody paste in the undergrowth.
If the sword wraiths didn’t kill him first.
Keverel was the first to reach him. Forbidden by his oaths to use bladed weapons, he lent his weight to Remy’s struggle against the roots, while raising his holy symbol high with one hand and calling out. “Back, spawn of the Shadowfell! By Erathis, you shall not have this boy!”
The wraiths paused and flitted smoothly away from Keverel, keeping Remy between them and the cleric. “We will have either him or what he carries, holy man,” one of them said. “Or perhaps both.”
“And perhaps we bring you along as well. The Shadowfell has delights for the mortal who denies himself worldly pleasures,” the other added. One of Lucan’s arrows passed right through it, wisps of black the only sign of its passage until it thunked into the trunk of the treant. Rumbling, the undead tree spirit took a step toward Remy.
Paelias landed next to Remy, sword drawn and ready to engage the wraiths. “You surely draw a lot of attention, youngling,” the eladrin said. His sword flicked out and was parried by one of the wraiths. “Lucan! Even the odds, mind?”
From the wraiths’ side, Lucan attacked, driving one of them into the other. Both glided out of his reach, but Paelias was watching the shadows and was ready when the first emerged from the shadowglide. His sword struck home, bringing a miserable screech from the wraith, whose return stroke caught only Paelias’s blade. Pressing his advantage, the eladrin struck again, and with a trailing scream the swordwraith vanished. Lucan awaited the other’s return from its shadowglide, looking hard for any trace of moongleam on its blade.
Biri-Daar thudded to the ground next to Keverel as the blackroot treant took another slow, implacable step forward. “I am loath to do this,” she said.
Landing next to her with flint and steel in one hand and an oil-soaked torch in the other, Kithri said, “If you let it squash Remy, it will probably go away.”
“Life is never that easy,” Biri-Daar said. She took a running step and leaped, new twin katars from Crow Fork Market reversed in her hands to use as improvised climbing axes. Below her, Kithri ignited her torch.