• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

It was dawn. The rising sun picked out the colors in the canyon walls, blinding Remy with beauty on this morning he had not expected to live to see … and he was invoking another god. Empty of feeling, he examined this problem. Why had it happened? Would it happen again?

“Keverel,” he said, but when the cleric looked his way Remy knew he could not say more about the true nature of the conflict he felt.

“Remy.”

A long time passed. Keverel did not press him and the boat was silent. After the previous evening and night, none of them had much to say. Obek rowed with his shield until Vokoun told him to stop. “Remy can row worth the two on the other side—not,” he was quick to add, “because they’re halflings, but because they’re lazy. Too lazy even to be killed by death knights when there’s someone else who can do that for them.”

They rowed in the dawn, until the sun shone over the diminishing canyon walls and Remy knew that whatever had come before, he was about to see the famed towers of Karga Kul. Paelias and Vokoun keeping lookout at the bow for snags and sandbars. After some time Remy said, “Philomen sent them, didn’t he?”

“Yes,” Biri-Daar said. She was trailing a hand in the water to soothe the burns from Gouvou’s flame.

“He spoke of Orcus. Was that bravado, or true?”

“True. Orcus puts his touch on all of the death knights. And every lich as well. The Road-builder and his retinue were given over to the Demon Prince as well. I fear,” Biri-Daar said quietly, as if she meant only Remy to hear, “that we have not seen the last of his actions yet.”

“Philomen is the Demon Prince’s man.”

It was not a question exactly, and when Biri-Daar answered she was expanding on what Remy said. “If you can call him a man,” she said. “He may have become something else.”

In the few minutes of their conversing, the canyon walls had grown lower. “It is one year, almost to the day, since I have seen Karga Kul,” Biri-Daar said. “These riverbanks lower, and the city grows closer. At the moment when the left bank begins to rise, and the right bank grows still flatter—that is the moment when you may look to the horizon and see the towers of Karga Kul. From there they look as if they hang over the waters of the river; but that is only an illusion. As you draw closer, you see first that they are on the left bank, and then, as you come farther down the river, they disappear for miles. Only in the last few bends, as you near the landing below the bluffs, do the towers reappear again. It is a trick of perspective, of the rise and fall of mountains. But it breeds stories.”

This was the longest Remy had ever heard Biri-Daar talk. She was coming home, coming to the end of her quest. And she was bringing him, with his demon-tainted chisel and his uncertain history … I have much to atone for, Remy thought. If not in the true situation of things, then certainly in the eyes of those who have endangered their lives to save mine.

Yet he was not the only one on the boat with something to prove, something to atone for, something to settle and make right. Biri-Daar had her own ghosts. “What did Gouvou mean about legacy?” Remy asked.

As soon as he had said it, Remy realized that it had come across as a match thrown into a hayloft. He lifted a hand and started to add something else, but he never got the chance. “Oh, I think he was clear about that,” came Lucan’s voice. Everyone looked around in surprise that the elf had survived the night and awoken coherent—save Keverel, who shocked Remy by shooting him a look of pure anger. Remy hadn’t seen the cleric that furious in any of their encounters with the minions of Orcus. “I just meant,” Remy began, but he didn’t get to finish.

“Yes, he was,” Biri-Daar said, picking up from where Lucan had left off. Looking at the contours of scale and color on her face, Remy realized that he had learned to read the expressions of dragonborn on this journey—one more thing he had never expected to know, or thought could be known, or thought about at all. “He did not tell us anything that we did not know already. Since