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They came down on the edge of the slab, forcing it down level with the floor—and the luck fled. Fleeing vrock demons, seeing their last chance, dropped from the darkness above, their sudden weight enough to pitch the slab over to an opposite angle. The seal hung out over the gap created by the tilt. Biri-Daar was left dangling at the end of the Seal, and Remy scrambled back from the sudden appearance of the endless, despairing waste of Thanatos spread out below him. The vrocks scrambled through the gap and were gone … all except one.

It craned its vulture’s neck and bit down on Biri-Daar’s leg. She growled and kicked at it with her other leg. It flapped its great wings and tugged, adding its two claws to the grip on her leg.

The seal began to overbalance and slid, grinding along the edge of the hole between the mortal plane and the infernal Thanatos.

Remy saw it all happening before it happened. Biri-Daar looked up at the seal as she felt it shift. She looked down at the vrock. She looked up into the darkness, toward the towers of Karga Kul that whitely reflected sunlight far above in a world that—Remy realized as Biri-Daar looked back down, and over, and directly at him—she would never see again.

She let go at the vrock’s next tug, and was gone through the infernal gap. Remy cried out, wordless and anguished, lunging for her—but she swung a powerful arm and knocked him away, his extended hand just brushing and tugging at her breastplate and down the length of the arm that shoved him back. Biri-Daar fell, eyes open, sword out, killing the vrock even as its companions swooped up from the black crags and Remy lost sight of her, the world lost sight of her. He scrambled back toward the center of the portal slab, still screaming even as he felt the slab’s inexorable swing, and it closed against the Seal with a boom that rolled up into the invisible heights of the chamber and out into the ends of the hall, far above in the quiet space of the council chamber of the decimated Mage Trust.

Uliana died knowing that the Seal was restored. Paelias, bluish pallor seeping into the skin around his mouth, lay dead near the figure of Philomen, who was on hands and knees.

Remy approached the vizier. There was something in his left hand. He looked at it and put it in the pouch where for the last weeks he had carried the chisel. Then he looked down at the drawn, corrupt face of his former mentor. This, he thought, is the man who got me out of Avankil. For that, despite everything else, I owe him a debt.

“Would the monks at the Monastery of the Cliffs have killed me?” he asked. “If I had lived to reach them? Or would they have taken me to the Road-builder themselves? How did you imagine me dying, Philomen?”

“You did not have all the luck,” Philomen said. “Boy.”

Wordlessly Remy ran him through, leaving his sword where it stood at an angle out from the ribs of the desiccated corpse of the man who had given Remy his first job. But that was when he had still been a boy. He looked around. “Lucan,” he said.

The elf was kicking over the corpses of demons and killing whichever of them stirred. “Remy.”

“Where’s Obek?”

“Here,” came the tiefling’s voice from the other side of the Seal. “Who do you think kept pushing when you were out on the carousel there?” Obek came into view—their light was much diminished, and Remy could barely see him until Keverel, his voice hoarse with exhaustion, invoked the name of his god one last time, the word Erathis spreading through the chamber, bringing light to the shadows.

“Philomen,” Keverel mused. “Vizier of Avankil.” He walked to the vizier’s body, rolled the staff along the floor with his foot, prodded the many sashes and pouches of the vizier’s robe. “It is a very dark day. Biri-Daar was the greatest of the Knights of Kul. Her memory may yet restore the order to the greatness that is its rightful legacy.” The cleric’s gaze roved over the carnage in the Chamber of the Seal, and came to rest on the Seal itself. “This is now the tomb of Biri-Daar,” he said. “Though few will ever