Keverel began ministering to Lucan as Obek helped Remy out of the water. “Brave stuff there,” the tiefling said.
“And stupid. Who jumps into water wearing a mail shirt and boots?” Vokoun shook his head. “Now that might be a story worth telling. If we live to tell any stories at all.”
Two of the halflings were dead, and the necrotic magic of the death knights’ weapons was working in every wound. Remy could see the flesh beginning to die even around the small nick across the back of his knuckles. Most of the others, cut much more deeply, were groaning and sick with the death rot. “Lucan’s going to die soonest,” Keverel said. “I have to see to him first. Anyone with a healing draught, what are you saving it for?”
Remy had one and gave it to Obek, who was wounded deeply in the side. There were three others for Paelias, Biri-Daar, and Keverel, whose head wound had exposed the bone of his skull just above the ear. The two remaining oarsmen were struggling against the current, which quickened as the river grew narrower and poured through a chute into another spot of flat water between sheer stone walls. “I need more oars,” Vokoun said. Remy sat down at one of the benches and picked up an oar. Obek took another. Paelias joined Keverel at the prostrate Lucan, who was muttering and gasping in a burn fugue.
“If he catches a chill, he’ll die,” Obek said. “Elf or not.”
One of the halfling oarsmen shrugged and said, “One less elf.”
Remy looked at him. “You don’t like elves?”
“He doesn’t have to like elves,” Obek said.
“I don’t have to like him.”
“Oarsmen!” Vokoun called out. “Shut up and row!”
“Whatever you want to call him,” the halfling said, “if he catches a chill he’s going to die.”
Keverel knew that too, and kept Lucan under two heavy blankets while he brought all of the power of his healing arts to bear. Lucan’s hair was mostly gone, his hands and face were badly burned and his chest and stomach were scorched where metal buckles had touched his skin as his clothing burned. Lucan shivered and muttered under the blankets, and Keverel muttered Erathian prayers and blessings back. Eventually Lucan subsided into an uneasy sleep. “Will he live?” Biri-Daar asked.
“I think so,” Keverel said. “I’ll keep doing everything I can.” The cleric looked exhausted. Yet he went from person to person on the boat, making sure that the necrotic effects of the death knights’ blades were arrested and that natural healing could begin. He spent extra time with Obek, who had been hurt more seriously than anyone knew. When he had made a round of the boat, Biri-Daar commanded him to get some rest. Keverel was asleep almost at once.
The banks of the river were lower around them, hilly and dark under the light of a gibbous moon that picked out occasional brighter rock features. “We shouldn’t tie up again,” Biri-Daar said. “In this wilderness, the only thing we’re likely to see is more of Philomen’s minions.”
Remy watched the banks slide by, his oar across his knees, waiting for Vokoun’s next order. Lucan would live, probably. And Remy had saved him from the two death knights, who would surely have killed him in the tree. I put an end to Gouvou as well, Remy thought. He was proud of himself even though he knew that he had done only what was expected of a warrior. He was proving himself worthy. Biri-Daar would accept him.
Another thought occurred to him. What need had he of Biri-Daar’s acceptance? She had saved his life, yes, but he had long since repaid that obligation, and was now with them of his own free will. He had the chisel, and his personal errand was to make sure that it was never used… and also to make sure that Philomen received the death he had earned.
“Do you think the devil you saw in Sigil marked you out to carry the chisel?” Obek asked quietly.
Remy thought about it. “Perhaps. How would I know?”
His brief sojourn in the Crossroads of the Planes had happened shortly before Remy had come to the vizier’s attention. That much was true. Whether one thing had caused the other… that was a question Remy could not answer.
“What else might devils have marked you for, Remy?” Obek was looking at the water, but Remy could tell he was tense and alert.
“It makes no difference,” Remy said. “I am done being marked out for anything. I make my own marks now.”
“I hope so,” Obek said.
Paelias came back to sit with them. “Lo, star elf,” one of the halflings said. “Your friend here is marked out by devils. Strange company.”
Obek turned and stared at the halfling until he looked away. When he turned back, Paelias said, “Biri-Daar doesn’t think it’s safe to tie up anywhere.”
“Didn’t Vokoun say something about rapids?” Remy asked.
“I did. There are rapids. If we cannot tie up, then we will have to run the rapids at night,” Vokoun said. Remy looked up to see the halfling pilot looking right at him, amused at Remy’s surprise. “You do know I can hear anything anyone says on this boat? No matter how quiet. On my boat, all words come to me.”
“Can we run the rapids at night?” Biri-Daar asked.
“Only if we don’t mind drowning or being dashed to death on the rocks,” Vokoun said. “If we want to live, we should find some place to haul the rafts out and walk them around. There are portages in this canyon.” He listened and Remy grew conscious of an approaching roar. “Hear that? It’s tricky in the daylight. At night? Madness.”
“This whole thing has been madness,” Paelias said.
“We run the rapids,” Biri-Daar said. “It’s too late to do anything else.”
Vokoun surprised Remy then. Rather than refusing, or arguing, he shrugged and signaled the oarsmen. “Very well!” Vokoun said. “For dying, one day’s as good as the next.”
He might have said more, but the sound of the rapids reached them, and there was nothing else to say.
The moon was almost directly overhead. In its waxing glow, the rapids of the lower Whitefall glowed a nearly incandescent violet. The ten adventurers on the boat could have linked arms and spanned the distance from canyon wall to canyon wall-and the river itself was narrower yet by twenty feet of fallen boulders and gravel. Half a mile upstream, the river was more than a hundred feet wide. Squeezed down to one third of its width, it surged and boomed over rocks the size of houses, with the walls spray-wetted for twenty feet above the river’s surface. Vokoun’s boat moved faster as if chasing the current ahead. “Oars in the water!” he cried. Remy and Obek looked at each other, not knowing what he meant; simultaneously they looked at the two surviving halfling oarsmen, both of whom were dragging their oars at an angle away from the boat. Remy did the same, and the boat swung into the center of the channel, drawn by the pull of the water piling over itself into the first chute of the rapids.
Remy had always lived on flat water, the Blackfall Estuary that stretched miles wide away from quays of Avankil. He had never seen rapids like these. The water ahead, as far as he could see under the moonlight, was white foam intermittently broken by darkness that could be either water or stone. Vokoun leaned out over the bow. Paelias was up next to him; the halfling called out something Remy couldn’t understand and Pealias looked back. “Row!” he shouted. “Row, for your lives!”
We want to go faster? Remy wondered. But the halflings were digging into the water, and they had survived this run before. He dug in, and saw Obek doing the same. The boat leaped forward again, and just as quickly swung sideways. Without warning Remy and Obek were on the downstream side of the boat. The halflings dug hard, trying to straighten out the boat as Obek and Remy dragged their oars. The boat started to pivot back-and an unseen rock tore the oar from Obek’s hands. He lunged after it, overbalancing and dragging the downstream gunwale perilously close to the water level. Vokoun was shouting something that Remy couldn’t hear. Remy hauled back on Obek, barely holding onto his own oar with one hand as he tangled the other in Obek’s belt. “Back in the boat!” Biri-Daar and the Halflings were screaming as Remy leaned back into the boat’s middle and Obek hung over the edge grasping vainly after the oar that had already vanished into the darkness. Vokoun and Keverel joined the clamor as Biri-Daar got a grip on one of Obek’s legs. The tiefling, knowing the oar was lost, was trying to get back in, but he had nothing to grasp and if he reached back his face dipped into the water.