The Seal of Karga Kul_ A Dungeons & Dragons Novel - Alex Irvine [23]
She saw the look on his face and smiled—an unsettling expression on a dragonborn. “That might be too abstract. Put another way, how do you know the demons and hobgoblins aren’t working together? Remember the demon’s eye, and the imps we killed in the stable. Everything is connected here, Remy. And you are connected to it as well, because of what you carry.”
“What do you think it is?”
Biri-Daar shrugged. “I have no idea. But if demons are after it, I would very much like to know, and I do not think it would be wise to let it—or you—wander off into the wastes. That is why I think it’s important that you come to Karga Kul and let the Mage Trust examine it. When the rest of our party arrives, you must make your final decision. I will say no more about it.”
She was true to her word, not speaking for the next two hours. Remy turned every possibility over in his mind, weighing his obligation against everything he had seen and learned since leaving Avankil. He was being hunted. Now he believed that. The sun tracked across the sky, and Biri-Daar silently offered him a drink of water. Remy thought of the Dragondown, the marvels that might await him if he went to Karga Kul—and the wrath of the vizier, who would certainly kill him if he did not go to Toradan.
Unless the vizier had been trying to kill him all along.
I could just leave the box in the sand, he thought at one point. Bury it, or throw it into a canyon. Let someone else find it. Let the hobgoblins have it.
But Biri-Daar’s resolute devotion to her code gave him pause. Could he really do that, not knowing what the box contained?
In the end, when the four riding figures appeared in the distance leading two other horses, Remy realized that he knew two things. One was that Philomen had put his life in danger. The other was that Biri-Daar and the rest of them had saved it.
“North or south?” Biri-Daar asked him when they had met the rest of the party and all six of them were in the saddle and waiting on the road.
Remy took a deep breath. “North,” he said.
BOOK II
THE BRIDGE
They rode north on a road sometimes covered by sweeping drifts of sand. Remy looked over his shoulder, riding second to last with only Keverel behind him. The road seemed endless in both directions, and he felt as if he was leaving behind something of his former self the farther he rode into the unknown reaches of the Dragondown Coast. The world was his to take.
“Pretty clear which roads find travelers and which don’t, eh?” Lucan said. “Here we go into the real wilderness.”
“At least we’ll get out of this damned desert,” Iriani said.
Kithri waved toward the Serrata. “In the foothills, before we start the climb up into those,” she said, “the country is beautiful.”
“What about after?” Remy asked.
“After? You mean on the Crow Road?” Kithri shook her head. “Never been. Never wanted to go. But,” she sighed, “here I am, going. You can thank Biri-Daar for that.”
“There is no collar around your neck,” Biri-Daar said without looking back.
Kithri rolled her eyes. Around them, the flatness of Crow Fork was giving way to a more broken country. Monoliths of ancient rock stood angled against each other, product of no mortal’s work. The ground, flat enough to bowl on back near Crow Fork, was heaved and crosshatched with small gullies. The road cut through some of them and wound along the edges of others. The sand that maddened travelers on the road to Toradan disappeared and clumps of hardy scrub sprouted at the bases of rocks and in the shelter of gullies. Around them the landscape came to hard-bitten life.
And ahead of them, far ahead, the highest peaks of the Draco Serrata gleamed white in the morning