The Seal of Karga Kul_ A Dungeons & Dragons Novel - Alex Irvine [2]
He came to the Undergate bearing the barge captain’s message. A guard at the gate, big as a dragonborn and just a bit less ugly, demanded the message.
I cannot, Remy said. It is for the vizier only.
The guard caught Remy’s arm and squeezed until Remy could feel the bones of his wrist grinding together. He stood it for as long as he could but eventually he cried out and dropped the slip of paper on the ground. The guard picked it up and squinted at the writing. He looked at Remy. What does it say?
How should I know? Remy answered. I can barely read, and I don’t know those letters.
Remy snapped briefly out of the fever. Cold sand against his cheek, cold stars overhead in a cold, cold sky. Remy shivered and knew he was going to die. This was what he got for going beyond the Crow Fork. All the world was darkness and cold. Something was eating the horse. Remy tried to look over and see what it was. He couldn’t lift his head. He tried to crawl away but couldn’t move his arms. With a sigh that was meant to be a scream he faded back into his delirium.
At the Crow Fork, the North Road splits, one arm reaching across the wastes toward the fabled Bridge of Iban Ja, where the Crow Road begins. There stands Crow Fork Market, an ancient trading post and bastion against the hobgoblin raiders who harry and destroy civilized outposts throughout the wastes between the Blackfall and the Draco Serrata Mountains to the north. Over the centuries the market had grown from a collection of tents to a fortified settlement and staging area. It sprawled and wound behind timber walls and beneath the pitiless sun of the wasted lands that stretch from the North Road away from the Blackfall toward the mountains. Remy had gone there for the first time a month before his father died, on a trading excursion in the company of a dozen other men and boys, of whom Remy was the youngest by more than a year. On that trip he had learned most of what he knew of the folklore of the Crow Road and the Draco Serrata. Those were stories for the campfire on the trip from Avankil; by the end of the trip, when the timbered walls had heaved out of the hazy glimmer at the horizon, Remy had been ablaze with the desire to see the world beyond the city he had known.
As he had fallen asleep that night, within sight of the glow of great fires and magical illumination inside Crow Fork Market, Remy had dreamed of going there again. And that night he had dreamed of taking ship and seeing the cities and towns of the Dragondown Coast: Karga Kul the largest, but Furia, Toradan and Saak-Opole each with their own histories and points of interest to an urchin who had rarely ventured beyond the walls of Avankil.
He had never dreamed that it would be six years before he saw Crow Fork Market again, or that when he saw it he would ride by, his errand too pressing to admit digression.
The vizier Philomen had found him soon after his mother’s death, which had occurred not long after the death of his father. Orphaned, Remy squatted where he could and fed himself how he could. Philomen’s guard—the one who a few years before had ground the bones of Remy’s wrist—caught that same wrist one afternoon as Remy was dashing off with a message from a ship’s captain to the woman he kept in apartments overlooking the Inner Pool. The vizier has messages that need carrying, the guard had said. Remy had never been certain whether it was an invitation or a demand; it had never occurred to him that he could refuse.
He heard the muted clop of horses’ hooves on hard earth. The road from Avankil to Toradan—the road at whose side Remy would shortly die—was laid down of stones cut flat and placed so that in most places a knife blade would not slip between them. Hooves made a different sound there. Someone was riding off the road.
To me, Remy thought. Someone is riding to help.
“Stormclaw scorpions.” The voice drifted down through the