The Seal of Karga Kul_ A Dungeons & Dragons Novel - Alex Irvine [73]
The great hall of the keep was quiet and cool, the only light within cast by the gap between the open doors. Once the hall would have been alive with a fire in the hearth, music from bards and jongleurs, the echoing impacts of bootheels and the click of dogs’ nails, but all of those noises were lost to the past. What remained was silence. “Where will the Road-builder be?” Biri-Daar asked, talking to herself. She turned to Lucan and Keverel, who had entered behind her. “How many towers are there? I thought I counted four from the ground.”
“Four at the outer corners of the walls, and then there are four in more of a diamond shape inside,” Lucan answered. “I made a circuit to be sure. It looks as if there’s some kind of bridge connecting the tops of all four towers.”
“I’ll answer your question,” Obek said. “The Road-builder will be where he can see his road. That means up.” He pointed to an open stairwell at the far end of the great hall. “All the way up, is my guess.”
Up into the tower they climbed. At each landing they stopped and broke down the doors facing each other across the tattered woven rugs that were the only splash of color in the gray stone of the tower’s interior. The rooms had once, perhaps, been sentry posts or firing positions for archers, storage areas or maid’s quarters. They were small, furnished only with ruins, their slitted windows looking out into the dizzying inverted outside world. On the sixth landing, Biri-Daar held up a hand. “Kithri,” she said. “Up one floor and back, quickly.”
Kithri could move like smoke. She was back within a minute, but even that minute was long enough for the rest of them to grow edgy and over-watchful, certain that something had happened to her and that they were waiting for an onrushing doom.
Then Kithri reappeared. “Next floor opens onto a bridge,” she said. “It passes over the courtyard inside the central keep to a rooftop garden. If you go the other way on the bridge, it connects all of the towers—just like Lucan thought from down below.”
Biri-Daar nodded. “That garden is where the Road-builder, when he was human, was known to study and walk. Or so the stories would have it. If he has become a lich, he will be there or he will be inside the chambers that adjoin it. From here, we must act as if he will attack at any moment.”
They assumed their battle order, altered with the addition of Obek, and ascended that last floor, coming out onto the open stone bridge that arched from the tower to the Road-builder’s garden. “Don’t look up,” Biri-Daar said.
“Or down,” Lucan added. Obek humored him with a dry chuckle.
Remy heeded neither injunction. He had never been afraid of heights, or of hanging upside down, and the sheer displaced wonder of the Inverted Keep kept drawing his attention. He looked down, and there were stars beyond the walls of the keep; the broken stone bridge protruding from its main portcullis gate obscured a fingernail moon, ghostly in the afternoon sky. He looked up, and there was the thunder of the Whitefall, in fierce rapids above them, canyon walls descending red and gray to the highland where the Road-builder’s Tomb sat below the keyhole at the end of the Crow Road. Remy could see the ridge where they had camped, and where Obek had waited for them to go into the Tomb and then followed when they were far enough ahead that the Road-builder’s crew had had the time to do their repairs.
The tiefling walked at Remy’s right. He too seemed to be enjoying the view. “I wonder how far one would have to jump before down would be down again,” he said, and tapped Remy with an elbow. “Eh?”
“I was wondering the same thing downstairs,” Remy said. Up this high, he wasn’t quite as keen to discover the answer.
Ahead of them, the bridge peaked and then began its descent toward the garden. In another hundred yards they would have their answers about the Road-builder, one way or another. Keverel whispered a blessing