The Seal of Karga Kul_ A Dungeons & Dragons Novel - Alex Irvine [103]
Remy and Biri-Daar flung the crumbling Seal away, clearing the boundary between portal and floor. The air around him burned and shimmered and he saw that the portal was starting to sink into the floor. A clear gap emerged on the opposite side of the portal. Demonic shapes scrambled up through it. On the side closest to Remy and Biri-Daar, the honor guard of the Knights of Kul stepped out onto the portal. “Now!” Uliana cried out, her ruined eye leaking tears and blood.
“Now or never,” Biri-Daar growled. She cut down the first demon out onto the portal.
A shape resolved from the shadows along the wall—tall, cadaverous, bearing a staff …
No, Remy thought.
It was not the Road-builder, returning at the last moment as his phylactery the quill burned away to nothingness in Uliana’s hand. Where Remy had expected the Road-builder stood Philomen, vizier of Avankil. But it was a Philomen transformed—his skin pallid, eyes alight with a fire like the fire that bled around the edges of the portal and flicked at the legs of the demons who continued to pour through the gap. The head of his staff, which back in Avankil was a seven-pointed star worked in emeralds and gold, was now a pale green iridescent skull. Like Shikiloa’s, Remy saw—a replica of the Wand of Orcus.
With a flick of one hand, Philomen froze the Knights carrying the Seal. “Look at me, noble dragonborn,” he said, voice low and inviting.
“No!” Biri-Daar roared, but they were looking … and they were falling, unconscious, the seal banging to the floor and crushing one of the knights beneath it. He lay, his life bleeding out of him, eyes unfocused, the pain not reaching through the vision of death Philomen had laid over them. More demons vaulted up through the gap. Remy joined Biri-Daar at the gap, cutting the insectile limbs from a mezzodemon as Biri-Daar slashed the wings and the head from a vrock flapping up behind it.
Philomen called out a word in a language Remy did not recognize. The demons stopped, not advancing but not retreating either. “Remy,” Philomen said, almost kindly. “My most trusted courier. You have completed your errand at last … although not without some unfortunate detours along the way. Come now. All is forgiven. I will take the chisel now, and events will run their destined course.”
Remy removed the chisel from its case, where he had kept it despite the breaking of the magical seals. He let the case fall to the floor and held it up as if it were a knife. “Was it you that time, in Sigil?” he asked. “Did you send me there, mark me, send me back?”
“It wasn’t so direct as all that,” Philomen. “Surely you know that I seldom act so straightforwardly.”
“Until now,” Uliana said.
The hierophant nodded with a glance at the last surviving member of the Mage Trust of Karga Kul. “Until now.”
Uliana stepped forward and confronted him. “This, Philomen, is an act of war by Avankil against Karga Kul. Know that in your lust to serve your master you have doomed not just the people of Karga Kul but the people of your own city as well, since war never leaves either side utterly untouched.”
“Uliana, I fear that I am beyond caring what the Mage Trust thinks. My master made his wishes known; I am pledged to bring those wishes about. Thus the chisel, and the final breaking of this moribund seal, which for too long has prevented the real powers of the planes from taking their rightful place at the head and throne of this world.”
Keverel spoke to both of them. “Uliana, you reason with a man who is beyond reason and no longer a man. Philomen, you command this rabble as though you were a hierophant, one of the death priests of Orcus. Surely one so powerful as a hierophant may simply do away with us and go about his business of flooding our world with demonic savagery.”
“Wait,” Remy said. “Philomen. Why do I need to give you the chisel?”
Philomen’s eyes narrowed. “You stand on a very thin edge, Remy. A word from me and you go into Thanatos.