The Seal of Karga Kul_ A Dungeons & Dragons Novel - Alex Irvine [81]
As Paelias had predicted and all of them had quietly assumed, Vokoun’s band of river halflings did not greet them as long-lost brothers, or even as fellow seekers after a common goal. The river pilot was cold as he looked from one face in the group to another. “So,” he said at last. “You have added a tiefling and left the halfling behind.”
“She died in the Inverted Keep,” Biri-Daar said. “Died well, in battle against the Road-builder himself.”
“And we have a great need for the speed of your boat, Vokoun,” Keverel added.
“Why would that be? Demons on your trail from the Keep? Dig up something hot from the Tomb?” The halfling, stout and resolute, stood with hands on hips confronting the human cleric and dragonborn paladin.
Lucan stepped forward. “Vokoun,” he said. “Look.” With sleight-of-hand tricks, he made gold coins appear, one after the other, seemingly from thin air. “All of us could use a little entertainment,” he added, “and we need passage aboard your boat. Come now.” He grew sober. “Kithri was a dear friend of mine. None mourns her more deeply than I—and yet there is no time to mourn. Not if we are to get to Karga Kul in time.”
A new campfire blazed up on the sandy spit of Iskar’s Landing. The sun had long since fallen behind the mountains. Down by the river, it was nearly dark under a sky of rich violet streaked with orange near the horizon.
“Teach me that trick,” Vokoun said. “And someone go find the upland men over by the creek. They have spirits. We can’t run the river in the dark, so you have the night to convince me.”
Later, around a fire of their own, Vokoun said, “Once I saved you folk from the yuan-ti. What am I going to be saving you from if I let you on my boat this time?”
“I believe we could have worked things out with the yuan-ti,” Paelias said. “Perhaps the next time we are ambushed, you can observe instead of intervening.”
“Perhaps I will, if only to shut you up, eladrin,” Vokoun said.
“The Road-builder,” Keverel said. “If it is the truth you desire and not a story that will let you pretend to be bolder than you are, there it is. We will carry the Road-builder’s phylactery to Karga Kul. And there, once it has accomplished its last task, we will destroy it. And him with it.”
Vokoun drank and started to speak. Then he thought better of the speech and drank again. After some time, he spoke. “The story is that the Road-builder became a lich.”
“It is true,” Keverel said.
“What happens if I don’t let you on my boat?”
“One of two things. Either we destroy Moidan’s Quill, which is also the Road-builder’s phylactery, and Karga Kul falls to a horde of demons, or we try to get to Karga Kul on foot and run the risk of the Road-builder appearing again before we get there.” Keverel reached out for the bottle and took a drink of his own.
Vokoun took it back, then remembered his manners enough to offer it around before drinking again. “And this phylactery. That’s what brings him back?”
“Until it is destroyed,” Biri-Daar said. “And it can’t be destroyed until we use it in Karga Kul.”
They told stories after that, in turns around the fire. Vokoun began, and spun a comic tale of his ancestors’ first boat, up in the marshes around the great inland sea that was the source of the Whitefall. Paelias picked up the theme of sailing, and told of an eladrin hero who sailed the astral seas of Arvandor in search of a woman stolen from him by Sehanine. Remy listened the entire time trying to figure out if Paelias was talking about himself. When the star elf’s story ended with its hero returning to the Feywild, and from there to the mortal world, without his beloved, Remy felt that he had learned something he might rather not have known. Paelias was a fine companion, and a strong ally in battle. His sorrow, once his story was known, belonged to the company.
He was thinking this while everyone looked at him and he realized