“Are we dam-builders now?” Kithri asked. “We’d have to hold all this back to get through this drain. If it’s there. And if it’s in a place that would let us get to the outside of the Keep and climb up.”
“You mean down,” Lucan said.
“If only I worshiped a god,” Kithri said. “Then I would be able to plead for you to be struck dead.”
Since there was no way up, they decided to go down. First they had to find pieces of debris large enough that they might be able to build some kind of barrier, a coffer dam of sorts they could use to expose the drain.
If there was a drain.
And they had to work fast because the miasma of the rubbish pit was very near to overcoming all of them, most threateningly Biri-Daar. She moved sluggishly, the pollution in her blood barely held at bay by Lucan’s herbs and Keverel’s healing magics. “There’s only so much we can do down here,” Keverel said. “We need to get out soon or that fever’s going to…” He trailed off.
“So much for your god’s favor,” Kithri said.
Keverel looked at her and held her gaze until she looked away. “Blasphemy isn’t getting us anywhere either.”
“How is it that we’re wading around in rotted potato peels when no living human has eaten a meal in this castle in… what? Hundreds of years?” Remy looked around in consternation.
“I don’t think time passes here the way it does outside,” Keverel answered. “These old vegetables might have been peeled and discarded a thousand years ago.”
“Next time I go adventuring, I’m staying above ground.”
“We are above ground, remember? And at least it’s not a sewer,” Lucan joked. They found several pieces of wood all together near the mouth of the trap chute and started working them loose to take farther down near the drain. Then Paelias stopped.
“Did you hear that?” he asked.
They listened. From the chute came a whispering, scraping sound. Then a whistle.
They looked at each other. Bad enough, ran the thought through every mind. Bad enough that we should be trapped down here; now something comes down into the trap to finish us?
Then they heard a voice. “Hsst! Is that Biri-Daar the mighty dragonborn paladin down there?” After a silence, the voice came again. “Come now! I heard you speaking to each other. I threw a rope down. Climb up or starve. It’s your choice, but make it soon. I’m not waiting forever.”
Paelias shone his light up into the chute. The curling end of a rope lay less than four feet from its mouth. “Ah, light,” came the voice. “See the rope? Let’s go!”
“It’s the tiefling,” Keverel said. He looked at Biri-Daar.
“Yes,” she said. Her eyes were dull with weariness and fever. “It’s the tiefling. Climb.”
Obek’s saturnine visage hovered over each of them in turn as they reached the steepest part of the climb, just below the gap in the stairs. “So,” he said when all six of them were back on the stairs. “Shall we move along to the tower of the keep?”
“Not until we get some explanation,” Keverel said. “Begin with how you came to be here.”
“I went through the Road-builder’s Tomb, just as you did.” Obek looked smug. He had the upper hand on them, and knew it, and looked determined to enjoy it while he could. Sitting there on the stairs as if they were all around a tavern table, he waited for their approbation.
“You fought your way through the road crew on your own,” Lucan said, his voice heavy with sarcasm.
“No,” Obek said. “I went straight through the tomb, not stopping to loot or fight. The Road-builder’s crew only fights if you are still there when they arrive to do their work. Then I followed your trail to this stair, where it ended. Simple. Now. To the tower?”
Biri-Daar’s lidded gaze had remained on the tiefling during the exchange. Remy wondered whether her fever was subsiding now that they were out of the pit. “Obek,” she said.
He stopped his needling and looked at her. Something deep and unspoken hung between them. Remy understood that he would never understand it. Human history was evidence that if humans were good at one thing, it was forgetting. Dragonborn and tiefling, it seemed, kept their histories alive… and in that was the danger that the past would rise up and overwhelm the present. That was what had driven Biri-Daar out on their quest to begin with, the sense that she could and must redress the failure of an ancestor.
I’ll take the present, Remy thought. It’s all I can handle. Let the past and future take care of themselves.
“You are resourceful and strong. So are the rest of us.” Biri-Daar paused. “But why dare the Road-builder’s Tomb so you can follow us to the perils of the Keep? There is more to this than you needing political cover to get back into Karga Kul.”
The tiefling leaned forward and the smile faded from his face. When he spoke, he spoke to Biri-Daar, but his words were meant for them all. “People look at me and see a devil. They’ve all heard the stories about Bael Turath. Thousands of years ago this happened, and yet I am held to account for it. All tieflings are. We have been pariahs ever since. Soldiers, sailors, explorers… we live hard, we die young. None of it ever makes any difference.” Obek’s eyes glowed dimly in the near-darkness. “You want to know why I have to get back into Karga Kul? Because if I do not, and the Seal is broken, every demon that comes through the gate is going to mean a thousand tieflings killed in cold blood somewhere else because they are mistaken for the demon-haunted. Some of them will deserve it. Most of them will not.”
Obek stood. “I do not wish to have that on my soul when I go to meet my gods.”
“Does anyone here believe a word he is saying?” Lucan looked from one of them to the other disbelievingly. “The Road-builder’s crew ignores you if you just keep moving? Surely we are not going to believe that just because he says it.”
Obek returned his gaze. “You want answers, friend elf, or are you content to turn your friends against me?”
“I want answers,” Biri-Daar said.
“The stories of the Road-builder’s Tomb are around for certain people to hear,” Obek said. “I have heard them. I could have told you of the crew if you had bothered to ask. I know a man who survived the trip through the Tomb and the Keep. The way he told it, the Road-builder let him live to spread the story… but took his hands so he would not loot the tomb. He told the story for his bread.”
“Where did he tell this story?” Biri-Daar asked. “Not in Karga Kul. Every story of the Road-builder that has traveled there, I have heard.”
“And I in Toradan,” Keverel chimed in.
“Different stories travel to Saak-Opole,” Obek said. “Probably all of the stories are lies, but we Northerners know better than to trust anything that comes from Avankil or Toradan, and we know that in Karga Kul is one of the thin places between our world and the Abyssal realms. Fit those two things together, and you know why I am here.”
There was a long silence. Remy did not know what to do. He was far out of his depth and had no idea how any of them could ascertain the truth of Obek’s tales, and tales about tales. A man without hands who had survived the Keep? Fanciful. But not impossible. What were they going to do? Remy waited, knowing that all he could do was follow the lead of Biri-Daar and Keverel, whose quest this was.
In the end, it was Keverel who spoke. “Obek of Saak-Opole,” he said. “We consent to have you travel with us. But know that none of us may expect to survive to see Karga Kul. Or what may happen once we are there again.”
Obek extended his right hand. “You will see,” he said. “There will come a time when you look at each other and think yourselves fools for debating over this so long.”