Remy never saw the signal, but at some unspoken sign the two dragonborn, one living and one dead, came together, swords ringing against each other and striking sparks from decorations on armor. The halfling crew kept their crossbows at the ready, but Vokoun held them back from firing. Keverel did the same for the rest of the party. Remy had never seen a ritual single combat before. Fights on the Avankil waterfront did not have rules. Even when one party called a man-to-man duel, there was always someone willing to slip in from behind and change the odds. The only halfling Remy had known at home specialized in slipping out of crowds to hamstring participants in such duels. He made a fine income at it until his face became known and someone cut his throat in a crowd before he could come out of it to cut a tendon.
That was Avankil. This was the lower Whitefall, and the death knights stood back as did the living friends and comrades of Biri-Daar.
Gouvou fought with a speed and agility that belied the death of his body. Remy had never seen a living being move so fast; Biri-Daar kept up, but only just. She parried, and took the blows she could not parry at an angle, striking back enough to keep Gouvou honest… or so Remy thought until he heard Keverel chuckle. “She’s learning,” the cleric murmured. “In another moment…”
Biri-Daar flicked the death knight’s blade aside and struck deep, through his armor and into the undead flesh below. Gouvou made a coughing noise and rang his blade off the side of Biri-Daar’s helmet. Dented, the helmet tumbled away until one of the watching death knights stopped it with his foot. Biri-Daar wounded him again, under the arm-and again, at the joint of his hip. Gouvou stumbled, the rhythm of his combat broken. Biri-Daar opened his armor from collarbone to nipple on the right side.
In his extremity, the death paladin found a last well of strength. Gouvou blasted Biri-Daar back with a storm of unholy fire, the shadowy flames pouring over her and driving her to one knee. She held there. Remy started forward; Keverel stopped him-as the steady clear light of Bahamut shone forth from Biri-Daar’s holy symbol, blazing through the unholy flames. She put her hand on her sword and rose slowly to her feet. The two faced each other.
“Biri-Daar, you fight for a legacy that never existed. This is the true legacy of the Knights of Kul,” Gouvou said, spreading his arms as unholy flames licked along the rents in his armor. Behind and around him, the same flames played across the bodies of the other knights. They raised their swords.
Biri-Daar roared out a gout of fire, overwhelming the unholy flames and scorching the undead flesh from Gouvou’s body. At the same time, Remy and Obek leaped forward. Obek shattered the death knight’s sword and Remy his breastplate and the bones underneath. Gouvou went down, reaching for his sword, but Obek cut off the reaching skeletal hand. Remy drove his sword point through the hole in Gouvou’s armor, feeling the blade punch through the armor on his back and sink into the ground. All around them, the subordinate death knights were attacking again. Remy spun away from a looping mace head, letting go of his sword and leaving it in the destroyed remains of what had once been the dragonborn paladin Gouvou. Obek cut down the death knight who had swung at Remy, and Remy reached to pick up a sword from the ground.
“No!” Lucan called. “It contains a soul!”
Remy’s fingertips brushed the hilt and he heard-as clearly as he once had heard voices from Avankil through an open door in Sigil-the soul speak to him. Instantly he knew everything there was to know about this halfling who had become a death knight. He was from a small village in the highlands outside Furia. He had fought, and fought well, in wars against the enemies of his liege. He had married, and begat children… and then been corrupted. In Avankil.
By Philomen.
The vision vanished as Remy heard the thundering crunch of Keverel’s mace. He looked and saw that Keverel had just crushed the final unlife from a halfling death knight in the act of reaching for the sword Remy’s fingers had just touched. With the fatal blow, the soul had departed from the weapon that bound the death knight’s essence.
More of them were coming from the woods. Two of Vokoun’s halflings were down. Keverel’s helmet was knocked off and the upper part of his left ear was hacked away. Biri-Daar bled from every limb, it seemed. Obek, Paelias… they were all wounded, and tiring, and the death knights still came from the trees.
Philomen had sent them. The vizier’s power reached even to the lower Whitefall.
The halflings called from the shore. All three of them fired their crossbows in the direction of the boat. “More of them!” Vokoun called. “In the water!”
“To the boat!” Biri-Daar roared out. They fought a steady retreat, holding back the flood of death knights as Lucan turned and unleashed a barrage of arrows at targets Remy couldn’t see. Two of the death knights reached the trunk of the leaning oak and began to climb.
Remy broke away from the group, seizing a long sword from the ground. He killed the first of the two death knights before it knew he was coming. The second, already clasping the tree’s lowest branch, knocked Remy sprawling with a booted kick to the side of his head. When he got up, he could tell that one of his eyes wasn’t focusing properly, and his ears rang. Still he jumped and grabbed the death knight around the legs. The branch broke off from their combined weight and they fell, the impact sending an agonizing throb through Remy’s head. He shoved the death knight away, clearing space for a sword stroke that opened its throat. It grinned horribly through the blood and Remy barely parried its return thrust… but parry it he did, and the death knight overbalanced ever so slightly.
In the moment when it was extended, its sword too far out and its cut throat fountaining blood onto the forest floor, Remy struck off its head. He turned and headed for the river’s edge, where the rest of the group were standing knee-deep and boarding the boat. Lucan’s arrows helped to hold the death knights back, but some of them waded straight in, and Remy could see another emerging from the water below the tree. “Lucan!” he shouted, pointing-but too late. It severed the boat’s mooring rope before three arrows punched down into it. Looking up, the death knight drew a throwing knife. A fourth arrow appeared to sprout from its armor, a perfect shot just to the left of the breastbone.
Its life force draining away, the death knight raised both hands and clapped them together. As it sank beneath the surface, the tree, and Lucan in it, burst into unholy flames.
Lucan screamed and leaped from the branch into the water, trailing the awful radiance of the unholy flames behind him. The tree burned as if it had been dead and seasoning for two winters, flames roaring up from it to cast flickering shadows on the combat at the shore. “Lucan’s in the water!” Remy shouted. Over the roar of the burning tree, no one could hear him. He dropped his sword, got a running start past the leaning trunk, and dived out over the boat into the black water beyond.
It was cold and his armor was heavy, dragging him down so fast that he could see the bottom, dimly illuminated by the burning tree. Lucan was close enough to touch; the unholy flames were still dying on his body and his eyes were wide with shock. Remy caught him and kicked hard for the surface, pitting his strength against the weight of the armor. It was a struggle he would only win for a few seconds. The hull of the boat above was a leaf-shaped blackness against the infernal orange of the flames. Remy reached, and kicked, and did not know he had thrust one arm out of the water until strong hands grabbed it and pulled him the rest of the way up. “Remy!” Keverel cried. He held Remy’s arm while Obek and Paelias pulled Lucan into the boat.
“Row!” Vokoun ordered. The boat was drifting, far enough out into the water that the death knights could not reach it-or reach up to it from the riverbottom. Remy could see seven of them still, grouped on the shore watching the boat.