“Begging your pardon, Excellency, but if the Road-builder returns you will find a brief hesitation to have been extremely rash,” Lucan said as he stepped forward.
Redbeard raised his goblet. “So we have a quill containing a lich king, a chisel imbued with demonic powers, a secret enemy in control of Avankil, and an Abyssal horde about to break through the seal. There. The situation is described. Now let us address it.”
Suddenly Remy liked him.
“Quite,” Uliana said. “The seal is weakened almost to transparency. I fear it is too thin to reinscribe.”
Redbeard set down his goblet. “Then-”
“Then we must inscribe a new one and destroy the old as we lay the new one in its place.” Uliana looked at everyone in the room, each in turn. “Then we must destroy quill and chisel both, and before the return of the Road-builder. Guard!” she called.
The senior guard inside the door stepped forward.
“Close the gates to the city,” Uliana commanded. “Both at the road and at Cliff Quay. No one shall enter or leave Karga Kul until the seal is replenished and our citizens and traders may safely go about their business again.” The guard left and Uliana turned to Biri-Daar. “You have an unexpected comrade in your group,” she said. “And I do not mean the boy from Avankil.”
“I’m not a boy,” Remy said.
“Ah, but you are,” Redbeard said, “because you do not know when to keep your mouth shut.” He gave Remy a salute with the now-empty goblet.
Shikiloa rose and paced. “As the successor to Vurinil, Mage Trustee of Karga Kul-”
“Daughter, I believe, is the word,” Obek said.
She glared at him, a flush rising across the planes of her face. Remy had seen that look on faces before killing. “-Vurinil, who was killed by the tiefling Obek, may I speak?” she asked Uliana-a little too sweetly, it seemed to Remy.
“Certainly,” Uliana said.
“Obek will certainly say that my predecessor was a usurper, and a betrayer of the trust between this city and the trustees. He may be right about this. It is also true, however,” Shikiloa said, “that since his murder of Vurinil-my father Vurinil, a noble servant of the trust and of Karga Kul-the seal has rapidly deteriorated, there have been sightings of demons in the streets and in the lower portions of the underground keeps. Now Obek comes back, in the company of Biri-Daar, herself a member of the same guild that stole the quill! And with them comes yet another stranger, this Remy, bearing a demonic instrument for the destruction of the seal! Fellow trustees, it seems that we have not helped ourselves by entrusting our lives and the life of Karga Kul to these… adventurers.”
“Yet what strange deceivers they be,” Redbeard observed dryly. “Coming right to the front door and presenting themselves to us.”
With a shock, Remy realized that the other three members of the trust, the ones who had not yet spoken in the debate, were asleep. Could this be the feared Mage Trust of Karga Kul, he thought-the trust that strikes such fear into its citizens that they pick up orange peels from the street?
“You are drunk,” Shikiloa said. “As is your custom. Well, it is my custom to suspect the motives of those who preach unseen danger, when they might well simply be aggrandizing themselves. You, tiefling. Murderer. You risked your life entering this room, did you not?”
Obek nodded. “I did.”
“If we kill you now, will your risk have been worth it?”
“Erathis is the god of this city, and I am an adopted citizen of Karga Kul,” Obek said, standing erect and fearless, not looking over his shoulder at the guards who awaited Shikiloa’s command to strike him down. “I returned to fight for this city, and as far as I pledge myself to any god, it is to Erathis.”
“And I’m sure he is glad of your devotion. It’s Erathis we need, and Bahamut too, and perhaps the Lady of Pain thrown into the bargain, if the Knights of Kul are to do us any good,” said Shikiloa. “I expect neither the gods nor the dragonborn to offer us any assistance we might wish to accept.”
A pained expression crossed Biri-Daar’s face at this mention of the Knights. “When the Knights of Kul are needed, they will rise to that need,” she said.
“That is my hope as well.” Uliana turned to the window.
Shikiloa smiled. “Will you go and ask them yourself? Perhaps you could bring them news of Moula and the quill as well.”
“If that is your wish, I am willing,” Biri-Daar said, in a tone of voice that indicated she was willing only, and just barely at that.
“Do not,” Uliana said. “Not yet. Instead let us see what the minions of Orcus are planning. I do not believe the Road-builder’s return is imminent. I would feel it. So we have a moment to gather knowledge, and perhaps even to use it wisely.” The last was directed at Shikiloa, in whose eyes burned something more than anger but just slightly less than hate.
She is afraid, Remy thought. He caught Biri-Daar’s eye, and Keverel’s, and saw that both of them thought the same thing. But of what?
The Black Mirror of the Trust was a circular pane of obsidian, polished and laid into a frame of burnished copper so that it could stand vertical or be laid flat. Each position lent itself to different methods of scrying. Uliana laid it flat. The rest of the Mage Trust spread around her and the mirror. Remy and the rest of Biri-Daar’s group mingled with them, Biri-Daar closest to Uliana and Obek on the opposite side. A visibly skeptical Shikiloa and an obviously drunk Redbeard were closest to Obek, where they could watch Uliana. From a chain around her neck she took a tiny crystal vial. Three drops of clear fluid fell from the unstoppered vial onto the polished obsidian. Whispering an incantation under her breath, Uliana moved her hand in a smoothing motion, a few inches over the obsidian. The drops spread into an invisible layer-and as they spread, an image emerged.
First came color: black warming through red to a fiery molten orange flecked with brilliant white. Then motion, the shapes of figures…
Remy saw Obek turn his head, ever so slightly. He followed the tiefling’s gaze and saw that Shikiloa was doing something with her hands. Looking back to the mirror, Remy watched the figures resolve. They were all shapes, all sizes, the nameless hordes of the Abyss under the control of their ruler Orcus. Orcus, the Demon Prince of the Undeath, sworn enemy of all things living. Goat-legged, dragon-tailed, with the horns of a ram and the fiery eyes of the greater undead. Bearer of the Wand of Orcus, with its skull of a dead god, Despot of Thanatos-his presence loomed over everything they saw.
“It is as I feared,” Uliana said. She spoke with her eyes closed, since to channel the vision into the mirror she could not see it herself-at least not with her eyes. “They are gathering. They know that the seal weakens. They know…”
Motion drew Remy’s attention away from the mirror and back to Shikiloa. He saw her hands move. She brought a hand to her face, kissed something she held between finger and thumb.
When she drew it away again, blood glistened on her lower lip.
Shikiloa extended her hand over the mirror. “Father,” she said, her voice low but clear in the nearly silent room. “As you bid me.”
As she opened her hand, Obek was reaching to catch the bright bloody sliver that fell from it. Redbeard, his eyes bulging from their sockets as he saw what she had done, flung out an arm and shoved her back away from the mirror, the action instinctive but futile as the sliver fell through Obek’s hand as if it was not there.
Obek clutched at his pierced palm, roaring with pain. Blood spurted from it as if it had been pierced by a spear rather than a sliver no thicker than a needle. Drops of that blood fell with the sliver onto the mirror’s surface. The color of the blood spread like a glaze across the scene of Orcus’s dominion. When it had covered the entire surface of the mirror, the entire surface flipped up to the vertical. Behind the bloody glaze, figures loomed closer. Something crashed into the finish.