“There are more yuan-ti than there used to be around here,” the pilot said as they poled their way through the swamp. Along the sides of the raft, archers stayed at the ready. Ahead, there was light-a patch of sky. Remy felt a weight leave his chest as he saw it. They had been closer than he’d thought; how terrible it would have been to die so near the goal… or the next stage in the goal, at any rate. “We run the tributaries all along here,” Vokoun went on, “and dip into the swamps as we hear about this or that ruin that might be worth a look. Usually whatever we find isn’t worth the fight to get it, especially the closer you get to the road. But today our shaman had dreams about the roadside near the fork, so we decided to come and see what might need our attention.” He turned to the group and winked. “Turned out to be you. Should have known you had a halfling with you. That’s probably what the shaman was really dreaming about. Half the time he’s chewed so much kaat that he can’t interpret his own mind.”
Vokoun paused for breath and Biri-Daar jumped in before he could get started again. “Can you take us as far as Iskar’s Landing?”
“Sure, that’s where we’re going anyway. From here, not much choice.” Vokoun spat overboard. Remy noted from the color that he was a bit of a kaat chewer himself. “But what do you want to go there for, if you’re headed for Karga Kul? We can get you there. For a halfling cousin-even a Blackfall cousin-it’s the least we could do.”
“We are in your debt,” Keverel said formally.
Vokoun laughed. “You sure are. But it’s a debt we’ll never collect, so why worry about it?” He spat again and looked over his shoulder at the sleeping Kithri. “She’s not doing well? She’s hurt?”
“She was badly hurt by an ogre some time back,” Keverel said. “She is healing, but more slowly than I would like. It’s the air, the bad spirits… for all I know, it’s the crows. Whatever it is, she’s not doing as well as I would have hoped. But she is tougher than the rest of us; she’ll come through.”
Vokoun clucked in his throat and said something in the river pidgin to the archers. Each of them made a similar cluck and a quick gesture over the sleeping Kithri. Biri-Daar and Keverel exchanged a glance. Remy watched, wondering if Keverel would add an Erathian blessing. When he did not, Remy then wondered whether it was because he didn’t want to offend their hosts or because he believed that, among halflings, the halflings’ beliefs carried more power. Remy knew little of gods. He had heard their names, and his oaths, when he swore them, were to Pelor, but that was because his mother had done the same. To devote one’s life to the service of a god… it was not the life Remy would choose.
And yet he would choose-was choosing, had chosen-a life of adventure, and so had Biri-Daar and Keverel. So perhaps a life lived for a god was not such a bad life after all. Remy was thinking of that when he fell asleep to the whoosh of the poles and the slap of water against the front of the halflings’ flat-bottomed boat.
In the morning, sun beat down on Iskar’s Landing and Vokoun’s band of river traders-or river raiders, if there was a difference-was gone. There the second terminus of the Crow Road-the Southern Fork-wound down through a cut in the highlands to a flat place at a sweeping bend in the Whitefall. The landing itself was a collection of docks and a rope-drawn ferry across to the Karga Trace, which rose through the Whitefall Highlands and led after fifty leagues to Karga Kul itself. River traffic from upstream stopped there during times of year when flooding out of the Lightless Marsh made the Whitefall too dangerous to sail; during those times, an impromptu town arose, loud with gambling, whoring, and the rest of the activities bored travelers get up to when their journeys are interrupted for weeks on end. There had been no rains in the past month, however, and the Whitefall ran easy there, deep and green in the shadowed overhang of the bluffs along its north bank.
Remy had dim memories of arriving the night before, stumbling off the halflings’ boat where it beached on the bank of a Whitefall tributary stream that ran into the main river a hundred yards upstream of the landing. He had stripped off his wet clothes and wrapped himself in a slightly less wet blanket and fallen straight back to sleep near a campfire on the riverbank.
“They got out of here early,” Remy said to Lucan. Someone had strung the wet clothes near the fire to dry.
“That they did,” Lucan answered. “But you also slept in. You can thank our cleric for your dry clothes. What a mother hen he is sometimes.”
Remy got dressed, looking around. Keverel was nowhere in sight.
“Before they left,” Lucan went on, “the halflings offered us a ride the rest of the way down the river if we make it out of the Keep.”
The Keep, Remy thought. He looked upriver, half expecting to see it. Lucan saw what he was doing. “We’re not that close,” he said. “We’ll have to head back up the Southern Fork to the main road and then to the Road-builder’s Tomb. According to Vokoun, the road isn’t underwater after the Crow’s Foot, and the local beasties are fairly tame because they’re scared of whatever’s in the tomb. Sounds good to me.”
“Sure,” Remy said. “Except the tomb part.”
“There’s where you’re wrong.” Lucan pulled a mug out of the ashes near the fire and tested the liquid in it with a fingertip. Satisfied, he took a sip. “Tombs mean plunder, young Remy. And even our paladin won’t object to us helping ourselves to whatever we find in this tomb. Not after the undead dragonborn the two of you saw back there.”
“She told you about that?”
“Why wouldn’t she? Biri-Daar’s proud, but she’s not one to hide things from us. You could live your whole life and not be part of a band whose leader cared more for your life than she does.” Lucan drank again, then sneezed. “She’s not much fun, but she’s a leader even I can trust. And I don’t trust leaders.”
Keverel and Paelias came up from the riverbank, where they had been trading travelers’ tales with the others passing through the landing. “The word is out that something got away from Avankil that wasn’t supposed to,” Paelias said quietly. None of them looked at Remy. “There are bounties. Whatever it is we’re doing with Remy’s package, we should do it quick or we’re going to have demons like orcs have lice.”
“And we need to get moving out of here now,” Keverel said. “It won’t be long before some of the more unsavory characters down there figure out that maybe we might be carrying what we’re asking about.”
Paelias looked pale and shaky, as if he had just finished vomiting. “Believe I should have something to eat,” he said. “But I don’t much feel like it.”
Keverel took his arm and pulled his sleeve back to reveal a bandage. Pulling the bandage back, he revealed a yuan-ti bite mark, four punctures that formed an almost perfect square on the eladrin’s forearm. “The poison’s not going to kill you. I made sure of that. But you are going to feel a bit under the weather for a day or so yet,” Keverel said.
“Wonderful news,” Paelias said. Then he bent over, Keverel still holding one arm, and threw up at his own feet.
Biri-Daar and Kithri approached from the other side. “We leave now,” Biri-Daar said. “Much of the morning is gone and we’re not going to want to spend a night anywhere near the tomb. That means we need to get to the Crow’s Foot in the Crow Road today and find a defensible place to make camp. Paelias, can you do it?”
“The real question is, does he want to do it?” Kithri asked. “Thought you were just riding along with us for a while.”
“A little poison isn’t going to stop me going into a tomb full of horrible monstrosities with my new companions,” Paelias said. Then he threw up again.
Kithri’s skepticism notwithstanding, Remy realized that at some point Paelias had become one of the group. No one had said anything about it, and he couldn’t tell exactly when it might have happened, but he was one of them, with the same mission.