And Kithri spun away, still impaled by Moula’s sword, her body turning over and over as it fell past the Keep’s outer walls up into the sky. The last thing Remy saw was Keverel reaching vainly after her.
Consciousness slowly returned. Paelias came out of the greenhouse, bleeding from a number of superficial cuts. Lucan, looking out over the parapet, wept. Obek poked through the Road-builder’s remains with the point of his sword while Biri-Daar and Keverel headed straight for the stone structure at the end of the greenhouse. “Everyone up,” Biri-Daar commanded. “We have yet to finish this.”
“Finish this?” Obek said. “What’s to finish? The Road-builder is dead. The dragonborn is dead. Let’s get the quill and head for Karga Kul.”
“Phylactery,” Keverel said.
Paelias nodded. “Any guess about what it might look like?”
“No.” Keverel shook his head. “Often they are boxes with small slips of paper in them. But they can be anything. I will be able to tell if we find it.”
“Who cares if we find it?” Obek said. Remy had been about to ask the same thing. They followed Keverel through the greenhouse and into the Road-builder’s study, a shadowed space littered with stacks of drawings and plans, bound books and strange instruments. A single small window looked out in the direction of the keyhole, which hung like a star formation in the earthen sky.
“If we don’t find the phylactery, the Road-builder will reappear. Could be now, could be in a few days or a week. No way to tell. But I’d like to make sure that he doesn’t come back at all.” Keverel started searching, digging through the furnishings in the Road-builder’s study, picking up speed as he went. At first he looked carefully; then he began to tear the study apart. Ancient scrolls and sheaves of vellum spun to the floor, along with surveying instruments, bound books, delicate scale models of bridges, retaining walls, even the Keep itself.
“What would it look like?” Remy asked, several times, trying to get the cleric’s attention.
Keverel swept clear the top of a drafting table, splattering ink across the maps and plans he had already flung down. He stood, shaking, a cut-glass paperweight held in his hand as if it was a rock he could brain an enemy with.
“Stop,” Remy said. “It won’t bring Kithri back.” He caught the cleric’s arm. Keverel dropped the paperweight. It rolled across the floor as the keep rocked in a tremor, perhaps an echo of its keeper’s death.
Keverel looked at Remy. Then he looked down. “Your box,” he said. “The seals are broken.”
“How do you-” Remy looked down too and saw gelid light spilling upward from the pouch where he kept the box.
“The Road-builder’s death,” Keverel said. “Or the second orb. Perhaps a combination of both. The discharge of magic broke the seals.”
“Catastrophe,” Lucan said. “We were hunted before. Now we will be hunted, and all of the hunters will know where we are.” He looked around as if expecting demons to rise from the stones of the Road-builder’s garden. “The Road-builder knew of Philomen. One wonders if the vizier himself might be waiting for us when we return to the shores of the river.”
Lucan’s anxiety infected Remy, whose mind filled with imagined scenarios. Had he been meant to fall in with Biri-Daar so all of them could be delivered to the Road-builder, decapitating the Knights of Kul at the very moment the city was most endangered by the thinning of the Seal? He couldn’t know. All he could do was look back on what had happened so far and realize that if things had gone differently at any number of moments, Karga Kul would already be doomed.
If, that is, the suddenly unsealed box had not doomed the city all by itself.
Remy could remember feeling that Philomen was among the greatest citizens of Avankil, a leader of all the Dragondown Coast. Now there could be no doubt. He had not only sent Remy out into the deserts to die, he was engineering some kind of plot involving demons and the undead. “If I ever see Philomen again,” he said over the Road-builder’s bones, “I will kill him.”
Overhearing, Biri-Daar came to them. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. First we had best see what Philomen went to all this trouble for,” she said. The rest of them gathered around and Remy set the box on the cleared drafting table. The sigils, both broken and intact, glowed a deep yellow, darkening toward orange. Remy opened the box. Within, set into a velvet bed, was a chisel perhaps eight inches long, octagonal in cross-section with each face carved minutely in long strings of runes.
“Ah,” said Keverel and Biri-Daar simultaneously.
Another glow appeared from a writing desk in a corner of the study. Every head turned to see that it came from a quill in a jar. The quill was long and curling, cut from the tail feather of a phoenix and burning as brightly as if that bird was at that moment immolating itself. But it was not burning; it was aglow, fiercely, as if challenging the chisel that at that moment was rising from the box.
“Hold it, Remy,” Biri-Daar said. “Steady it.”
“No,” Keverel said, but Remy had already caught the chisel. It was hot in Remy’s hands, but not too hot. The cleric looked as if he might say something else, but he held his tongue and went to the writing desk. Gently he touched the quill and plucked it from the inkwell in which it stood. “It is as I feared,” he said softly.
“What is?” Paelias asked.
“The Road-builder’s phylactery is Moidan’s Quill,” Keverel said. “We must get to Karga Kul before he returns.”
BOOK V
An hour after the Road-builder’s death, the six survivors clustered just outside the portcullis at the Keep’s main gate. “Obek,” Lucan said for perhaps the fifth or sixth time. “You heard this from someone who claimed to have heard it from someone who knew the man who had no hands that claimed to have lost his hands in this very keep. Do I have that right?”
“Give or take one someone,” Obek said.
“I don’t believe it.”
“Our alternative seems to be climbing back up the inside of the Road-builder’s Tomb,” Paelias said.
“Would you like me to go first?” Obek said. “I’m willing.”
“How will we know it works?” Lucan asked.
“Enough,” Biri-Daar said. She stepped forward and cast the rope off the broken bridge. It snaked out, falling into the sky, looking terribly frail and thin when it had reached its full length. Biri-Daar stepped back. “If you’re still willing, Obek.”
“Ah,” he said. “Sacrifice the tiefling.”
“The tiefling should perhaps remember that he offered.”
Everyone stood around for a count of perhaps ten. Then Obek picked up the rope, swung it loosely around one gloved forearm, and lowered himself over the edge. They watched him descend until he was out of sight. “We should still be able to see him,” Paelias said. “There is an illusion at work.”
The rope appeared to swing loosely in the breeze below-above-the Keep. “Lucan,” Biri-Daar said. “Then Keverel, then Paelias, then Remy, then me.”
In that order they descended the rope and disappeared. “Probably the tiefling is killing us one by one as we appear… wherever it is that we appear,” Paelias said as he swung over the edge. “Just remember as you die that I told you not to trust him.”
“Those will be my last thoughts. Yes, they will.” Remy cast his eyes to the heavens, and was unsettled when he found himself looking up the Whitefall rapids toward a spectacular waterfall, its curtain of mist picked out in the evening sun even though the bottom of the canyon was in darkness.
Biri-Daar nudged him. “Your turn.”
With the rope in his hand, Remy paused. “The Road-builder knew that the quill was necessary to keep Karga Kul from being overrun. To keep the demons on the other side of the Seal.”
“What better way to guarantee a long life?” Biri-Daar said. “Or unlife. We’ll talk this over when we’re on the ground. Right now the goal is to get there. Go.”