The Seal of Karga Kul_ A Dungeons & Dragons Novel - Alex Irvine [105]
Paelias had known luck would not save him, Remy thought. That is why he handed it off to me. The footloose eladrin, unwelcome among his own, had died saving the lives of strangers.
Remy charged toward Philomen, the agony of betrayal too much to bear—but luck intervened. A vrock scrabbling through the opening between worlds caught the hem of Remy’s tunic in its beak. He lost his balance on the angled surface of the portal slab, and fell. The vrock raised a talon; he parried it; the vrock let go his tunic and bit into Remy’s shoulder, the hooked tip of its beak punching through armor and muscle straight to the bone. With the hilt of his sword he hammered at the side of its head, again and again, breaking its beak and then shattering its skull. It fell limp and he kicked it back through the gap whence it had come.
“The seal, Remy!” Biri-Daar called. “Now!”
Remy ran to help. Reaching the corner of the seal nearest him, he dropped his sword and found purchase for his hands in the grooves of the deeply cut runes. The magic pouring from them tingled in his fingertips; the wound in his shoulder pained him less, although still terribly. With every pull on the seal, the muscle in his shoulder tore a little more.
The floor of the chamber was polished to a fine gloss, and the seal too was smoothed by the attentions of long-dead artisans. It moved much more easily than a stone of its weight should have … until it hit the raised lip at the edge of the tilted portal slab. “Lift,” Remy said through gritted teeth—not to Biri-Daar, stronger than he was, but to his shoulder, which screamed out in his head as he bent his legs and strained upward with everything he had. The seal came up off the ground.
Around them the battle surged, Lucan and Keverel and Uliana and the recovered Knights of Kul arrayed against a host of demons that grew with every moment. Uliana’s greatness, Remy realized, would never be known. She brushed aside the demons like flies, destroying them with a thought. Only Philomen was a worthy opponent for her.
And she was slowly, surely, getting the better of him as well. He could draw on the strength of Thanatos, on the awful power of the Demon Prince of the Undeath—but she drew on the power of the very stones from which the city of Karga Kul had been hewn, the unknown thousands of years that men had struggled to keep the demonic hordes from overrunning the mortal plane. All of that—all of what made Karga Kul, Karga Kul—was with her. Philomen struck at her with necrotic horrors, visions of the damned; she struck back with the elemental rage of mountain and sky. Keverel, the holy man of Erathis, fought with her, the strokes of his mace and strength of his faith slowly taking their toll. In Uliana’s remaining eye shone the grim and somehow ecstatic determination of the warrior who knows that she will not survive the day, but knows too that a more important enemy will die with her.
The Knights of Kul killed and killed, also knowing that they were to die. So brave, Remy thought, seeing one of them at last overrun by a swarm of evistros, killing them even as they tore the life from his body. Let me be worthy of that bravery and that sacrifice. And Paelias’s sacrifice of luck.
It was a prayer of sorts, and whether any god heard it—Pelor or Corellon or Erathis or any other—the act itself restored Remy’s resolve and strength. With Biri-Daar on the corner of the seal nearest him, Remy braced his feet on the other side of the raised lip of the portal slab, hauling the seal out over it as Obek pushed from behind and the Knights of Kul gave their lives for their city and the honor of their order. But still the slab and the seal did not meet flush, and the sigils began to flicker. The magic, given its potency by fleshly sacrifice, faded just as fleshly life did—only much faster. “To me, Knights!” Biri-Daar called out, and the four remaining Knights of Kul leaped to her, seeing at once