The Seal of Karga Kul_ A Dungeons & Dragons Novel - Alex Irvine [82]
It was a secret he had never told anyone, of the time when, running from a gang of older boys, he had leaped across a sewer ditch and skidded on the fog-slick boards he landed on, straight through an open street-level window. He had landed hard, flat on his back, and lain in the darkness trying to get his breath. Outside the window, he heard the other boys laugh—they’d only seen him lose his footing and skid out of sight. When their sounds diminished to silence, Remy rolled over onto hands and knees and looked around to get a sense of whose home or shop he had accidentally invaded. Probably he could climb straight back out with no one ever knowing he had been there; but what would it hurt to take a look around first? If, of course, he wasn’t in the kind of place where a wandering youth could find more trouble than he bargained for. Avankil was full of such places.
Slowly his eyes adjusted to the dimness. The room was narrow and rectangular, with the window in one short side and two doors in the other. The short walls were stone and mortar, slightly damp with the normal condensation of a belowground room, while the long walls were covered with slotted shelves, as if someone had once stored bottles there. Remy could well understand why they no longer did; in this part of Avankil, anything within sight of a window and unprotected by magic or blade would be stolen the moment its owner turned his back. The room was empty now, but knowing Whisker Angle, Remy feared that anything might happen.
All the more reason, perhaps, to get moving and get out of there—but there were those two doors set into the far wall. One clearly led up. A sliver of daylight was visible at its bottom, between door and jamb, and Remy could hear human voices on the floor above, their sound reflecting down the stairs. Three voices, it sounded like, speaking a sailor pidgin Remy recognized but did not understand.
An argument was perfect cover, was it not, for a little exploration?
The second door—it was on the left, and the door met the jamb flush, with no hint of light, noise, or smell from the other side. Remy listened and heard nothing. He opened it, slowly, and when he had opened it halfway he stopped and stared, struck dumb by what was on the other side.
A fat tiefling in a butcher’s apron sorted through a bin of severed wings. “You here about the knucklebones?” he asked gruffly. In one hand he held a long, reptilian wing, with stubby claws at its main flight joint; in the other, a cleaver.
“The what?” Remy said.
“Knucklebones. Wyvern knucklebones. If you’re not here for them, what are you here for?”
“I just—” Remy gestured over his shoulder and glanced back.
The room he had just been in was no longer there.
He spun back around to see the tiefling grinning at him. “Never been here before? An adventurer.” He waggled a cleaver in Remy’s direction. “Lucky you don’t have wings, boy. You’d have walked out of here without them.”
The tiefling pointed to another door beyond an enormous butcher-block table. “Out is that way. Back to where you came from is somewhere out there. Luck.”
“But—”
“Go, boy. Nothing stays in here but me and dead things.”
Remy went. Out the tiefling butcher’s door, he found himself on a strange street. It was wider than most of the squares in Avankil, and everywhere he saw doors. There were round doors with latches set in the middle, double doors made of stone or pebbled black wrought iron; there were doors in the street itself, and doors that seemed to hang just near a structure without being attached to anything. And among those doors moved … everything. Every race Remy had ever seen in Avankil, or read of in the illustrated scrolls he spied in ship captains’ collections or the vizier’s library, or heard stories of in tallow-stinking taverns or beneath an ancient pier swaybacked with age. Every monstrous humanoid or