The Seal of Karga Kul_ A Dungeons & Dragons Novel - Alex Irvine [76]
“Do you feel it, Remy? What you’ve brought me? Or should I say—what brought you?”
What brought me? Remy paused. The hesitation cost him as one of the vestiges got too close. Remy started to feel thick, started to think he heard the voices of the flowers beckoning him closer … they were spirits. They had not just grown from dead men, they were the spirits of the dead.
“Remy!”
Light blazed through the curtain falling over him—the light of Erathis, as Keverel gave himself up to the power of the god working through him. Karga Kul was Erathis’s city, one epitome of the law and progress that pleased the god. If the quill would save Karga Kul, Erathis would work through Keverel to bring it there.
The vestiges began to fall back, torn to pieces by the force of the light from Keverel’s talisman. Moula fell back before a fresh sustained attack, pivoting around and retreating in the direction of the bridge over which the party had first come to the garden. Biri-Daar pressed him; she grew more resolute and he more desperate, and at the same moment they opened their mouths and engulfed each other in flame.
Fire of another sort, black and curling and cold, spewed from the Road-builder. It brought forth a fresh cluster of vestiges. Obek struck again and again at the lich, and Remy did too, reinvigorated by the blazing Erathian light. He felt his sword bite into the Road-builder’s bones. Paelias, given a brief respite by the momentary destruction of the vestiges, returned to the battle with a fury. All of the undead plants surrounding the Road-builder uncoiled and sprouted into sinewy vines, spiked with long black thorns. Some of them caught at the lich’s robe, some his legs, some snaked up his arms. The Road-builder tore some of them free; others died the moment they came within the reach of his aura. But Paelias grew more vines, the power of the Feywild momentarily overpowering the lich’s compact with Abyssal forces. Slowly the Road-builder was overcome; slowly the sword strokes of Remy and Obek began to tell.
All of them gained strength from Biri-Daar, her paladin’s charisma bathing them in its psychic glow. With every strike at Moula, she grew stronger. Light flared more and more brightly from her sword. Behind Moula, Lucan began to stir. He got to his knees before the dragonborn traitor stumbled over him and went down, knocking Lucan down again as well. Moula landed heavily on Kithri. Lucan, long daggers in both hands, sank one of them to the hilt in a gap in Moula’s armor, behind his left shoulder. The dragonborn roared in his agony; Biri-Daar bore down and split his shield in two, severing his shield arm above the wrist.
The remaining vestiges, at a command from the Road-builder, raised their spectral arms. In the space above the Road-builder’s head, a sphere of deepest empty black appeared. The incongruity of it, seen against the pleasing highland prospect that was their sky, was suddenly to Remy almost as horrible as the necromantic sorcery of the orb itself. He thrust, and his blade jammed in the hinge of the lich’s jaw. Splinters of bone flew away from the impact as the necrotic orb hovered over toward Lucan and Biri-Daar. Paelias’s vines caught one of the Road-builder’s arms and pulled it off with a grinding crack. The Road-builder was speaking, the language long dead and sounding like death itself in Remy’s ears. Dying, Moula got to his feet one last time, knocking Lucan aside. Biri-Daar swung and he raised his maimed arm, sacrificing the rest of it to deflect the stroke.
Kithri stirred. Her face was pale, her eyes struggling to focus. One of her hands felt blindly along the gravel, looking for her sling or perhaps another weapon. Moula sank back, waving the stump of his arm trying to get his balance. Biri-Daar broke his collarbone and brought a freshet of blood from his chest with her next blow. He swung, forcing her back … and then he looked at her, the traitor regarding the avenging