Laughter erupted around the fire, and Remy took the joke in good humor. Coming from Obek it was easier. There was no deceit in him. Nor was there any malice. Tieflings were notorious for both, which either made Obek unusual for his race or meant that the other citizens of the Five Cities didn’t know tieflings very well. “Crow Fork Market reminded me a little of it, but I didn’t want to say anything.”
“Wise,” Lucan commented. “We barely believe you now. Then, before we’d seen you in action, we’d never have taken you seriously.”
“I wasn’t even there, and I can agree with that,” Paelias agreed.
“Is it true?” Vokoun said.
Remy nodded, looking into the depths of the fire. He fancied he could see a tiny salamander, a scout from the Elemental Planes sent to see if the suddenly exposed chisel was of interest to the elemental powers… then it was gone. “Yes,” he said. “It’s true. I’ve never seen it since. I would like to go there again.”
“The Lady of Pain has walking potatoes for servants?” Vokoun looked as if that, more than anything else, was impossible to believe.
“I don’t know what he was, really,” Remy said. “That’s what he looked like, though.”
“The part that worries me is the devil giving you a coin,” Biri-Daar said. Remy looked at her and could see her measuring him yet again, deciding where his obligations lay, and his loyalties. The story disturbed her, he could tell. It disturbed him as well; how was he to know whether some kind of spell or curse had been placed on him?
“Paelias,” Remy said.
The star elf held up a hand. “Biri-Daar,” he said, “devils have many reasons for doing what they do. There is no taint of the Abyss on Remy, save the chisel.”
“How much more do you need?” Obek joked.
“Silence,” Biri-Daar said. “We weigh the success of our quest here, and the survival of Karga Kul. It is no time for jokes.”
“Every time is a time for jokes,” Obek shot back. “Especially the most serious times.” His sword sang out of its scabbard and hung perfectly level, its point an arm’s length from Remy. “So. Do we kill the boy and take the chisel ourselves? Do we kill the boy and destroy the chisel? Or do we quit this arguing and go on to do what needs to be done?” At each question, Obek turned the blade of his sword, walking the gleam of firelight up and down its length. “Me, I just need to get back into Karga Kul. Whatever makes that happen faster, I am for.”
“Put up your sword, tiefling,” Biri-Daar said evenly.
He looked at her. “I am called Obek.”
After a pause, Biri-Daar took her hand from the hilt of her own sword. “Put up your sword, Obek,” she said.
The blade flashed once more as Obek reversed and sheathed it. “There,” he said. “Done. Now let us go to Karga Kul.” Then he looked at Remy, who had not moved during the whole exchange. “Joke, my friend. It was a joke. No one was ever going to get killed.”
Maybe not, Remy thought. But he also thought that Obek was going to be in for a surprise if he ever came after Remy seriously. Remy wasn’t a Quayside urchin anymore, or even the vizier’s messenger. Somewhere along the Crow Road, he had become a warrior.
They pushed out into the lively current of the Whitefall an hour after sunrise the next morning, Vokoun at the tiller whistling an elf melody. The river was narrow and fast but mostly flat for the day, he said. “Just one bit of white water to get through, past the crook below Vagnir’s Ledge.”
“Sounds like there’s a story in that name,” Remy commented. He was just behind Vokoun, enjoying the feel of the boat on the water. The rest of the party was clustered closer to the middle of the boat, trying to stay out of the oarsmen’s way.
“There’s a story in every name,” Vokoun said. “Most of them aren’t worth telling.”
The story of Vagnir’s Ledge, Remy found out later, concerned a suicidal dwarf and a chance encounter with a griffon, after which the dwarf became a legendary hero among his people-who inhabited the caves along that part of the canyon. But before Remy ever heard that story, he and the rest of the group very nearly ran afoul of those dwarves’ ancient enemies.
After a full day of riding the river, monotony broken only by the occasional nibble of a fish on the hooks they trailed behind the boat, they tied up to a leaning oak tree, its branches spreading a good fifty feet out over the water and its roots exposed at the river’s edge. “In ten years it’ll be a snag,” Vokoun said.
“In ten years, you might be a snag too.” Paelias jumped nimbly from the boat up to a low-hanging branch and swung into the tree. The rest of the non-halfling passengers disembarked onto the shore while the crew made the boat fast and cleaned out the day’s trash. They clustered in a flat crescent at the base of a wooded mountainside, with the sound of a stream nearby and the forest canopy alive with the energetic songs of birds. “This would be a fine place to settle,” Paelias said from his perch.
Some of the halflings hopped out of the boat and set to work building a fire at the shoreline. “Someone’s been here before, and didn’t like it,” one of them said, holding up a skull.
“Maybe not such a fine place to settle,” Remy said. He and Lucan scanned the edges of the clearing.
Keverel examined the skull while the halflings finished laying the fire. “Whoever this was, a blade killed him, and not two years ago,” he said. Something crashed in the woods, some distance above them. The sun was low; already it was dusk in the trees and on the water, and the light falling on the other side of the Whitefall’s canyon was darkening to orange.
More crashing from the trees put them all on guard. Vokoun and the four halfling rowers cocked small crossbows and clustered together. Remy drew his sword and heard the creak of Lucan’s bowstring. “Erathis,” Keverel murmured, and at the invocation of the god a dim glow spread from the edge of the woods. Remy could see it playing along the edges of swords and the curves of helmets. But it was not men they were going to fight.
“Death knights,” Paelias said as the undead soldiers broke into the open clearing. The halflings cocked crossbows and the party fell into combat order, their backs to the river. Remy had heard of death knights. In the stories, a single one of them could tear through a company of marching soldiers as if they were farmhands. At the edge of the trees, he could count at least a dozen of them. Perhaps more.
One, a dragonborn, larger than the rest and clearly the leader, stepped forward and raised a hand to arrest the progress of its subordinates. They stood at attention, eyes dimly aglow along with the steel they wore. “Biri-Daar of the Knights of Kul,” the champion said.
She stepped forward to face it. “Once you were Gouvou, were you not?”
“Once I was living Gouvou. Now I am a servant of Orcus and my name is no longer of any use.”
“Yet I will call you Gouvou,” Biri-Daar said. “Because that is the name attached to your treachery.”
“What have I betrayed? Surely not the legacy of the Knights. That was formed at the Gorge of Noon, at the southern foot of Iban Ja’s bridge. Moula carried it on. I carry it on.” Gouvou opened his jaws wide, threw his head back, and roared. A column of flame, burning the color of shadow, or clouds on the horizon lit by distant lightning, erupted from his mouth-and the radiance of Erathis disappeared.
“It is their unholy fire,” Keverel said. “He may think it has driven the light of Erathis away, but he will discover differently.” The cleric touched his holy symbol to his lips, then drew his mace up and held it at the ready.
“He did not?” Remy said softly.
Keverel shook his head. “I could bring it back. But to what purpose? We can see them now.”
Biri-Daar drew her sword. “Single combat,” she said. “Hold your minions to it.”
“You put me at a disadvantage. Will your fellows submit should I defeat you?” Gouvou laughed, a sound like the rattle of a snake. The sound hung in the air, against the backdrop of the river’s rush.