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Looking straight ahead, Remy nodded. “Yes, I would,” he said.

Karga Kul! Where demons fear to tread …

When the Crow Road was built, Karga Kul was there. When Arkhosia and Bael Turath destroyed each other in blood and sorcery and the smoke of sacked cities, Karga Kul was there. Its scholars claim seven cities have risen on the great cliff where the Whitefall meets the sea, and seven times seven languages have been spoken in the halls of its keep, and seven times seven times seven rooms are built below the lowest level in a dungeon from whose furthest corners one can step, incredibly, up into the Underdark.

And in one of those seven times seven times seven rooms is a door that leads nowhere on the mortal plane. This door is bound in iron, its hinges ruined with acid, molten lead poured into the cracks and the magical sigils of seven civilizations inscribed into the lead.

Over all of this, forming an unbreakable barrier, is the eldritch Seal of Karga Kul.

If any man or woman knows who put the seal on that door, the story has never been told, or it has been lost over the centuries. What is known is that on the other side waits Doresain, the Exarch of the Demon Prince Orcus. For a century of centuries he has waited for that door to open. His demonic allies and underlings wait with him: the apelike barlgura, insectoid mezzodemon, avian vrock and great pincered glabrezu, six-armed marilith with the serpent’s tail. The Abyssal chamber where Doresain held his watch was lit by the infernal glare of the immolith, and the hulks of goristro muscled smaller demons out of the way along the walls.

Somewhere in the world, it was said, secret cults worshiped Orcus. The most dedicated of these cults spawned powerful death priests, anointed by Orcus himself and given power over men’s dreams. These cults work to open gateways between the Abyss and the mortal realms; their methods are assassination, infiltration, seduction … rarely do they show themselves. Karga Kul is their greatest prize, and the one they have never gained. Other armies have marched on Karga Kul, and broken on its walls. Never has the seal been broken, and never have the demons of the Abyss been unleashed to ravage the city from the inside, and, with it destroyed, spill into the mortal world.

Periodically the seal grows weak, and must be reinscribed. The quill that may inscribe the seal is kept far away, in a location known only to the Knights of Kul, the dragonborn elite given the Duty of Moidan’s Quill after the great victory at the Bridge of Iban Ja …

“That’s you, isn’t it?” Remy said.

Biri-Daar nodded. “Me, and my ancestors stretching back perhaps a hundred generations. I am given a most sacred trust.”

“We have the quill now?”

“No.” Biri-Daar looked out over the Crow Road, where shapes danced in the gloaming as the sun fell into the mountains behind them and the sky darkened through violet and toward black in the distance ahead. “Moidan’s Quill was first held by Bahamut himself. He inscribed the symbols that hold the Abyss bottled in the bowels of the dungeons below Karga Kul. Never have the dragonborn guardians of the quill failed to present it when the seal grew faint and needed reinscription. I will not be the first.”

Remy worked out in his head what he was already assuming to be the truth. “It’s in the Inverted Keep.”

“Yes,” Biri-Daar said. “It’s in the Inverted Keep.”

“How did the Inverted Keep get … inverted?” Remy asked. Also he wanted to ask what were those shapes dancing at the edge of the darkness ahead of them, but they were far enough not to worry about just yet … and in any case could be just illusions born of the road’s bizarre origins … and the story Biri-Daar told was too fascinating. Remy couldn’t imagine listening to anything else …

There was a jerk around his waist, and Remy flew off his horse and hit the ground hard. The impact jarred something loose in his shoulder, and also in his mind. He had been ensorcelled! Something …

The thing wrapped around his waist was a vine. Remy dug