The Seal of Karga Kul_ A Dungeons & Dragons Novel - Alex Irvine [83]
He looked down again. A detail jumped out at him: next to the doors that he could see—dozens of them!—was carved a symbol. A hand, fingers up, with a teardrop in the center of its palm.
“Or,” commented a passing elemental wisp, “a drop of blood. The Lady is quite taken with the falling of blood and tears.”
Remy started. “The Lady?”
“Ohhh,” crooned the wisp. It was the color of air, visible only as a distortion of what was behind it. Its eyes were blurs. “You are in Sigil yet you know not of the Lady. A delight! How has this happened? No, wait. You opened a door, did you not? In a city on the mortal plane, where you come from. And you found yourself here.”
“Yes,” Remy said. “But—”
“Where is here? Sigil! City of Doors! Crossroads of the Planes!” The wisp swept in on itself, curled into a spiral as if aspiring to the colors in the sky. “This is the place that is always between all places,” it went on. “The place from which you can get to any other place in a single step. The place that holds Creation together. The knotted, beating heart at the center of all that exists.”
Then it vanished. Its voice, lingering a moment longer, added, “Or perhaps not.”
Remy walked through the city of doors, seeing in each of them a gateway to a world as large and various as his own. Could it be true? “Boy,” a voice hailed from a half-open door set beneath an overhang carved with a large version of the Lady’s symbol in yellow and red. Remy looked and saw a devil, three-eyed and four-armed, with a tail curling around its feet. “You don’t belong here, do you, boy?”
“I’m here,” Remy said.
The devil clapped, one pair of hands slightly later than the other, creating a delayed echoing effect. In the portion of the sky Remy happened to be looking at over its left shoulder and down a short alley beyond which Sigil apparently vanished quite soon, a star went out. “Excellent response,” it said. “The only response that makes sense, which makes you quite out of character here. It is a point of pride among the citizens of Sigil that they make sense to outsiders rarely, and then only when they hope to gain something from it.”
It clapped all four of its hands on Remy’s upper arms. He tensed, fearing violence—how would he fight a devil in a foreign place, with no weapon and no friends?—but the devil laughed. “You walked through a door you had never seen before, in a place where you had reason to fear for yourself. Is that not so?”
“That’s true,” Remy said.
“True is a word I don’t much like,” the devil said. “So. That is a word. When one speaks of true, one is speaking of morality.”
Remy wasn’t sure what to make of this. “Ha!” the devil crowed. “A boy who knows when to keep his mouth shut. Would you like a way home?”
It waved a hand and the door next to it opened. Through the doorway Remy could see the waterfront of Avankil. The Blackfall meandered, wide and lazy, past the quays. A smell of slack water drifted through the door, becoming one more of the smells Remy had not had time to disentangle from the overwhelming savor of Sigil.
“What’s it going to cost me?” Remy asked.
“You can either kill a man for me or agree to perform an unspecified deed at an unspecified time, which will be no more of a moral transgression than killing a man.” The devil grinned at Remy, clasping all of its hands together. “What say you?”
Remy thought about it. He was thirteen, old enough to know when someone was trying to put something over on him but not quite savvy enough to know what it was. At this moment he knew that no matter