“What do you know?” Paelias. “Every time someone asks you something, O dragonborn leader, you tell us what you don’t know.”
“What do I know?” Biri-Daar repeated. “I know that the Inverted Keep hangs hundreds of feet in the air over the Whitefall, and that the way into it involves a way underground through the tomb of the Road-builder. I know that he transformed himself in some way, and presides over the Keep as he has done for centuries. I know that…” She faltered.
They rode in silence until she was ready to speak again.
“I know that there is a dragonborn there. One of my ancestors,” Biri-Daar said quietly. “I know that one of the Guardians of the Quill is there. That…” Again she trailed off and again she mastered herself. “That will not be so once we have come and gone.”
None of them knew what to say. Remy watched the dragonborn who had led them this far, and he understood more about how and why she did what she did.
“I will find Moidan’s Quill, and bring it out, and we will take the quill to Karga Kul,” Biri-Daar said. She said it to the sky but meant them to hear it. “The Mage Trust of Karga Kul will use the quill to reinscribe the seal and replenish its power. There are too few points of light in the world,” Biri-Daar went on, and her voice broke. “Karga Kul is one of them. It is also my home though I have not been there in many years. I would not have it drown in the chaos of the Abyss.”
If someone had asked him to list five things he thought he would never see, Remy would have put seeing a dragonborn cry high on the list. And he would have put tears from Biri-Daar at the top of any list. The paladin cried silently and without motion, riding forward with no change in her pace or expression. “It occurs to me,” Lucan said, “that if all of us chose to bear the sins of our ancestors, we would surely be suicides.”
“I fear that I can disagree. My ancestors have pledged themselves to Erathis for as long as there are records in Toradan,” Keverel said.
“Surely we don’t have to remind the good cleric that holy men sin,” Kithri said. “If we do have to remind him, I know some songs.”
“I don’t think so,” Keverel said, but once Kithri got started with a song, there was no stopping her.
Here I am, Remy thought periodically over the next few days of riding. I am with a group of strangers on a quest that means little to me. Why did they insist I come with them? Why didn’t they leave me at the market?
The box that had caused all the trouble was a foot long, give or take, and perhaps three inches wide and two deep. Its clasp was pewter and the seam between its lid and the box was invisible-unless magical attention was directed at it. The seam had glowed right along with the sigils on its lid when Iriani had first investigated the box. Remy wondered again what would happen if he opened it. It had been some time since anyone or anything had tried to take it from him.
What did Philomen want? Was Biri-Daar right that the vizier was untrustworthy, that he had sent Remy out into the wastes to die? Biri-Daar’s theory was that Philomen needed the object Remy carried to disappear because other forces in Avankil wanted it. Or that Remy was never intended to survive the trip to Toradan, and that after his death some agent of the vizier’s would have found his body and recovered the box.
No one in the group seemed to have any patience for the idea that Remy had been intended to deliver the box to Toradan.
“Who were you supposed to speak to there?” Biri-Daar asked on their fourth day. The Crow Road switchbacked down a steep slope for as far as they could see in front of them before disappearing into what looked like a lowland jungle. They weren’t in the lowlands yet, but before they got to the Whitefall there would be a good deal of marsh to traverse. Biri-Daar remembered that much of her previous passage along the road.
“I was given a place,” Remy said. “The vizier told me that when I arrived at Toradan, I should find the Monastery of the Cliff and speak to the abbot. But he never told me the abbot’s name.”
“The Monastery of the Cliff,” Biri-Daar echoed. “What would those monks want with a package from the vizier of Avankil?” She clucked her tongue, something that Remy had learned meant she was mulling a problem with no obvious solution. “You were sent out into the desert to die, Remy,” she said shortly. “That is clear to you now, isn’t it?”
“I know it’s clear to you,” Remy said. “That’s why I came along. But I still don’t understand… I don’t know anything. What does any of this Karga Kul business have to do with me?”
“The Abyss pursues you. And demons threaten Karga Kul,” Biri-Daar said quietly. “Do you want to stake your life on that being a coincidence? I would sooner cut my own throat than deliver an unknown, magically guarded item to the monks on the cliff.”
“Why?”
“It has been long years since those monks kept their holy orders,” Biri-Daar said.
They rode in silence for some time after that. Eventually Remy worked up his nerve and said, “Biri-Daar. This is a personal quest for you.”
The dragonborn nodded.
“Almost an obsession.”
Biri-Daar made no response.
“Perhaps your obsession is making it seem like my errand has something to do with your quest,” Remy said. “I don’t see it.”
“Would you like to turn around and go home now, Remy?” Biri-Daar asked.
Yes, Remy wanted to say. I would like to turn around and go home and forget that any of this ever happened…
Except that wasn’t true. All his life he had dreamed of adventure. He had looked at the ships docked in Quayside and imagined going all the places they had gone… all the places his father had gone. Remy had insatiably devoured every tale of heroism and magic, of questing and exploration, that he could find. He had learned to read solely so he could follow the stories told in the one book his mother had-her great-uncle’s memoirs about his time at sea in the waters far beyond the Dragondown Coast, waters beset with floating ice or great mats of living vines that grew up from the depths to ensnare and destroy unwary mariners…
He had memorized the names of every city and town on the coast and determined to visit each and every one, swearing to himself that he would make his name in the world and leave behind stories that other men would write.
“No,” he said to Biri-Daar. “I don’t want to go home.”
“Wise,” said the paladin.
“We both know I can’t go home anyway. It’s not wise to accept that which cannot be changed.”
“Perhaps not,” Biri-Daar said. “But it is certainly unwise not to. You are good company, Remy. And you have the makings of a fine warrior, it seems to me. But you are with us because… I must be honest here. You are with us because I trust nothing that has any taint of the vizier,” Biri-Daar said. “And that includes you.”
The Crow Road wound like a snake through swamp and jungle after descending along the flanks of the last northeastern range of the Draco Serrata. The earth itself turned first to mud and then seemingly to a slippery tangle of root and rotten leaf, as if they walked on a pad of floating plant matter under which there was nothing but dark water all the way to the center of the earth. That was what it felt like when the skies lowered, and through the midday semidarkness they tried to keep to the road, feeling its algae-slicked stones under their feet until inevitably they stepped off and began to slide into the depthless muck. Biri-Daar nearly roped them all together, but at the last minute thought better of it; the threat was a little too real that they might all be reeled downward like a stringer of fish.
“Hey, Lucan, what do the crows have to say?” Kithri asked on their second day out of the mountains. The entire world was the drip, drip of water in the overhanging trees and the softly terrifying sounds of creatures unseen moving in the shadows.
“These are the Raven Queen’s watchers here,” Lucan said, looking up into the tangled canopy. Remy couldn’t even see the birds he was seeing, and even if he could have seen them, he wasn’t entirely sure about the differences between crows and ravens. “They are less willing to speak to me. The Queen, they think, is unhappy with our errand.”