The Seal of Karga Kul_ A Dungeons & Dragons Novel - Alex Irvine [91]
“High side!” Vokoun screamed again and again.
The boat swung so close to a group of boulders that Remy could have reached out and touched them, had he a free hand—but Obek, closer yet to the rocks, shoved the boat away with both hands and used the same shove to arch himself back, getting just enough of his weight close enough to the boat that Remy and Biri-Daar could haul him the rest of the way in. “Row! Row! High side!” Vokoun and Paelias screamed.
Remy and Obek flung themselves up and across the width of the raft, bringing it back to level with a crash and fountain of spray. Some of their gear went overboard, but in the dark Remy couldn’t tell what it was. After that everything was the roar of cold water over black stone, the sting of spray, the ache and tremble of muscles fighting the current. Remy slowly felt himself turning into a sort of golem, rowing when Paelias yelled row and doing anything else only when told … a rowing golem, made to move boats through dangerous mazes of broken stone and surging water. Spasms racked his back. His hands were partly numb and partly torn with blisters that broke, bleeding onto the oar and into the water. Yet he rowed when he was told. Beside him Obek tried to row with his shield, his harsh devilish features set in a mask of angry determination.
Everyone began to scream. Remy could not hear what they were saying. He looked up and saw that the entire river was pouring into a single chute, narrow enough that the boat turned sideways would dam it up, the water charging up the rock walls that bound it in tongues of spray taller than the obelisks at Crow Fork Junction. The boat seemed, incredibly, to rise as it rode the cresting volume of the river through this choked-off throat—Remy thought, in his exhausted golem’s haze, of a rope swing that hung from a long cypress branch over a deep pool just upstream of Avankil’s old city walls. When you swung, there was a moment of perfect stillness as you reached the top of your arc; the river spread below like a sheet of tin on cloudy days, like a blazing mirror when the sun shone; and you fell endlessly until you broke its surface and plunged through the deeper and deeper shades of greeny brown, the cold of the Blackfall’s deepest belly just reaching your feet before you again hung suspended, weightless, and began to kick to the surface with burning lungs and schemes aborning about how to cut in line to do it again faster, sooner next time.…
And in the next moment they were gliding across the unbroken glassy surface of a deep, wide pool. The sound of the rapids was already fading. The boat turned in a slight eddy, finding its way to slack water in the shadow of a sheer rock wall that disappeared straight down into the depths. Remy reached out his oar to push the boat away from the wall. “Row,” Vokoun said. His voice, worn down to a deathbed wheeze, lacked its usual commanding tone … but they rowed. The boat heeled around and pointed downstream again.
By dawn, they were in a stretch of river that Remy would have sworn was just upstream of Avankil, in a region known as the Striped Bank. There the steep hills on either side of the river, and looming steeply over the tributaries that ran cold and fast down from the hills, were horizontally streaked in fantastic shades that Remy had only otherwise seen in the frozen sherbets mixed in the keep for Philomen and others in the nobility of Avankil.
Here, too, the streaks in the canyon cut were visible, and in similar colors; and also here, the river itself ran smoothly between them, even if the smaller streams that fell into it tumbled over themselves in their eagerness. But downstream, Remy knew, was not Avankil but Karga Kul. They fled toward it with death knights on their trail, and Erathis only knew what other minions of Orcus.
Erathis. He had sworn