The Seal of Karga Kul_ A Dungeons & Dragons Novel - Alex Irvine [72]
“My stomach will not accept this,” Lucan said. He turned away from the vista, facing the wall of the Keep’s central tower.
The rest of them looked around the courtyard, where lay the remnants of the Keep’s first garrison and residents—their bones, their clothing, their boots. Kithri and Remy kicked through it, wondering if there was anything of value and wondering, too, whether these long-dead soldiers and cooks would rise to attack the living intruders. But the bones stayed dead, and yielded nothing more interesting than a ring of keys. Kithri picked them up. They were iron, and without rust.
“Interesting,” Paelias said. “There’s no rhyme or reason to the way things age and decay. In the refuse pit I saw an apple core that looked as if someone had bitten into it this morning. Here we have bones as dry as any found in a thousand-year-old tomb.”
“It’s a dead man’s magic,” Lucan said. “Emphasis on the man. Humans know so little of time that they have even less grasp of it after they die.”
The eladrin and the elf ranger looked each other in the eye, something passing between them. “What?” Keverel asked.
“Lich,” Biri-Daar said. “They are deciding between them that the Road-builder has become a lich.”
“Yes,” Paelias said.
Remy looked at each member of the group in turn. They were all facing one another except him and Obek. Sidling a step closer to the tiefling, he asked quietly, “What’s a lich?”
“A human wizard of great power,” Keverel said, “who undergoes a dark ritual to survive beyond death. If the Road-builder is a lich, we’re going to need to find his phylactery, the vessel that contains his soul. We must destroy it to kill him. It will be somewhere in the Keep.”
“Perhaps, perhaps not,” Paelias interjected. “For all we know it’s back in the tomb. It could be anywhere.”
Keverel looked doubtful. “It’s a rare lich that wants its phylactery too far away. But we shall find out soon enough.”
Over at the wall, Biri-Daar looked out through an arrow slit, listening absently to the lich discussion. Remy had come to the wall as well, his head spinning with the inversion of earth and sky. The paladin’s brief season of humor seemed to have faded. Again she was her implacably determined paladin self. “I fear the worst about the quill,” she said, “and we must find it to confirm those fears or teach me that they were mistaken.”
“Biri-Daar.” She looked over at him. Remy was nervous to say what he was about to say, but it needed to be said. “Couldn’t we leave the box here?”
“We don’t know what’s inside,” she said.
“True,” he said.
“You will carry it until the gods will that you put it down,” she said. “There is no avoiding that. Accept your burden, Remy. Carry it through. The reasons will become clear to you.”
He realized then that he was more like Kithri or Lucan than Keverel or Biri-Daar. The gods were real to him but distant. He spoke the name of Pelor because it had been spoken around him in his boyhood. In contrast, Erathis and Bahamut were real and present, a constant and living influence over the cleric and the dragonborn paladin.
Looking out the window at the bottomless sky below, Biri-Daar said, “There is a long way to fall.”
“How far would you fall? Before you turned around and started to fall down. Real down.” Kithri had appeared next to them. She looked confused. “When we came down the shaft inside the Road-builder’s sarcophagus, one moment it was climbing down and the next up and down weren’t the same directions. How far away … is there a magical field?”
Paelias, also coming over to lean against the windowsill, shook his head. “I do not know. This is an ancient magic, a kind of magic few initiates in any discipline would attempt—would know how to attempt—today.”
“Back to the lich,” Biri-Daar said. “O eladrin, you manipulate the conversation with surpassing skill.”
Paelias rolled his eyes. “Simple truths are all I speak.”
“It’s time to go.” Biri-Daar shifted