Knight of the Black Rose

THREE

The sheer whiteness of his surroundings caused Lord Soth’s unblinking eyes to smart. The mist pressed thickly in from all sides. It crept through the gaps in Soth’s armor and rubbed against him like a monstrous cat. Tendrils of the milky stuff ventured into his ears and mouth and nose, but soon retreated from the corrupt being of the death knight.

“Caradoc,” Soth uttered as he scanned the brightness around him.

The mist swallowed the word, leaving him to wonder if he’d actually said it. Perhaps he’d only imagined calling his seneschal. He repeated the name more loudly. “Caradoc!” No reply.

Soth did not know how, but he had lost hold of the ghost when the mists had flooded the throne room. He felt certain the cowardly seneschal had fled. No doubt he’s cowering in some corner of the keep, Soth decided. Or he’s floating around the study, trying to pretty up his shattered skeleton.

After listening for a moment, Soth cursed with frustration. The fog was even damping the banshees’ wailing. Yet that seemed incredible to the death knight; the high keening of the unquiet spirits could be heard from the keep’s highest tower, even through floor after floor of stone. Soth listened again. Nothing. The banshees were silent.

“This is some ploy on their part,” he rumbled. “Or perhaps they fled when I attacked Caradoc.”

But Soth knew that the banshees would not have missed out on the entertainment of Caradoc’s punishment. The elven spirits were spiteful creatures, and the seneschal’s pain would be nectar to them. Recalling that his throne had been just behind him when the mists had obscured everything, the death knight turned slowly. Step after careful step he took, but more than three dozen paces brought him to neither throne nor wall.

Two things became obvious to Soth: he was no longer in Dargaard Keep’s throne room and the fog that had engulfed him was born of magic, not nature. “This is far beyond your power, Caradoc,” he hissed. “But there are others…”

The death knight let the sentence trail off as he considered the source of his predicament. Perhaps it was Takhisis. Had he angered the Dark Queen by plotting the death of Kitiara, one of her favorites? No. In-fighting and murder were common amongst the inner circle of her faithful. She would not punish a minion for acting upon the evil urges she herself championed.

This sort of indirect torture was unlike Paladine as well. The Father of Good preferred to torment his enemies with more blatant hells. The same was true of the self-appointed Heroes of the Lance, Tanis Half-Elven and the motley group of mortals who fought against Takhisis’s forces on Krynn. Like Paladine, they eschewed subtlety in favor of direct confrontations with their foes.

“Ah!” Soth exclaimed at last. “Caradoc’s tanar’ri ally!” He looked into the mist, searching for some sign of the evil creature. “Show yourself, dark one.”

The mist curled before Soth’s glowing orange eyes, but no creature appeared. The death knight frowned beneath his heavy helmet. Again he listened intently. No sound penetrated the fog.

“Have you brought me to the Abyss, then?” Soth asked of his unseen tormenter. “If so, this is a place I have not yet visited.”

Soth expected no answer, but he was no longer speaking in hopes that someone might reply; he was talking for his own sake. Mortal terrors held no sway over the death knight, yet absolute silence was as frightening to him as the grave to most living men on Krynn. It was in silence that Soth felt himself slipping into oblivion, losing memory, losing the pain that reminded him he still existed. For the last three hundred fifty years the banshees had filled Dargaard Keep with their screams. Now Soth found himself surrounded by silence, utterly alone, absolutely adrift from Krynn.

The death knight momentarily considered using magic to escape from the fog. He had a few spells at his command and many supernatural powers granted him by his unlife-he could journey from one shadow to any other of his choosing, for example. But there were no shadows in this mist, and Soth was wise enough to know that attempting any other incantation when he was still unsure of his surroundings would tempt disaster.

“If you will not show yourself, I will explore your domain and find my own way out.”

This said, the death knight marched off at a steady pace. To keep his mind occupied, he concentrated on moving in a straight line and counting his steps. Such a tedious task could not make up for the lack of sound, lack of smells, lack of sights in the mist. Soon a numbness washed over Soth, sapping his will to proceed.

When he ceased his march, the death knight drew his ancient sword from its scabbard. What should have been a sharp hiss, metal scraping against metal, came to Soth’s ears as a dull, flat sound. “You will not break me!” he said, raising his sword high into the air. “I defy you, whoever you are!”

With a start, the fallen knight realized that he could see the sword he held in front of himself, its blade sharp but stained dark with old blood. The mist had ebbed at least that much. Looking from left to right, Soth saw that other things were revealing themselves as well.

It appeared as a looming shadow at first, but soon a large, barren tree became visible. Its withered branches were twisted and gnarled, reaching into the mist like an old miser’s hand clutching after a pile of gold coins. Soth held his sword before him and studied the tree for a moment.

The small hill upon which the death knight stood revealed itself next. Patches of weeds struggled for purchase in the rocky soil. Small bushes and stunted plants huddled away from the tree at the hill’s crest. Near those tangled, white-flowered privets and scrawny belladonna, swirls of mist still covered the stony ground. Most of the fog was rolling steadily downhill toward vast stands of drooping firs and barren oak.

“I am far from Dargaard,” Soth whispered.

The rest of the scene became clear to Soth as the mist retreated completely. The death knight stood on a low hillock, which was itself surrounded by a dense forest. To the south a turgid river, swollen with spring runoff, meandered through the trees. Distant mountains stood in almost all directions, their snowcapped peaks pushing high into the air. As Soth watched, the sun touched the range to the west, setting the horizon alight with subtle shades of crimson, gold, and purple.

After the monotony of the mists, he was overwhelmed by the vista unfolding around him. The sound of small birds heralding the end of day, the pungent smell of nearby flowering bushes, and the brisk touch of the evening breeze now stirring the trees-all these prodded the undead knight’s slumbering senses. To one who had long tasted the world as only ashes, the sudden burst of sensory input was almost maddening.

Again Soth faced the tree at the hill’s crest. What the knight saw there momentarily blinded his glowing eyes to the wondrous sights and struck his ears deaf to the marvelous sounds. Beneath the gnarled tree thrust up from the rocky earth stood his seneschal, Caradoc.

The ghost was obviously dazed. He hovered beneath the black-barked tree, his head resting painfully on his shoulder. Blankly, through pupilless eyes, Caradoc stared at the world around him. The wisps of mist that clung to the seneschal’s clothes made them seem even more ragged than they were.

Soth smiled grimly. “The tanar’ri lord betrayed you,” he said, pointing the tip of his sword at Caradoc for emphasis.

The seneschal stood as if caught in a trance. His eyes remained rolled back in their sockets, his lips moved in rapid bursts. He didn’t raise his hands to defend himself. In fact, he acted as if he could not see Lord Soth at all.

“I will break each of your limbs before I send you back to Chemosh,” the death knight vowed as he approached the ghost. “You will beg for mercy, beg to reveal the hiding place of Kitiara’s soul.”

Soth took another step closer to the ghost, then paused. He was but an arm’s length away from Caradoc, and still the seneschal hovered mindlessly beneath the tree. Now, however, the death knight was close enough to hear the low utterances coming from the ghost’s lips.

“The void,” Caradoc muttered. “Death for the undead. White. Nothing. The void!”

Travel in the mists has unhinged the weakling, Soth decided scornfully. He looked to the lowering sun and addressed it. “Tanar’ri lord! This insect is broken. Any pact you forged with him is null.” He watched the sky and the earth for some sign of the monster. “Give me the medallion containing the human woman’s soul and transport me to my castle on Krynn, and I will consider this matter settled. If you do not, I will hunt you forever. I must have Kitiara’s soul!”

“Kitiara?” the ghost mumbled. “ ‘Retrieve her from the Abyss,’ he commanded, and so I did.”

Savagely the death knight grabbed the ghost’s arm and shook him. “Yes, Caradoc, you retrieved her. Which tanar’ri lord did you leave her with? Where is Kitiara?”

A spark of consciousness flickered in the ghostly seneschal’s blank eyes. “Tanar’ri lord?” he asked, confused. With a shudder, Caradoc pulled away from the death knight. A panicked look had replaced the vague one on his face, and he held his hands straight before him. “Enough, my lord. I have seen the white void that waits for the undead banished from the mortal world. You have tortured me enough.”

“Then tell me where Kitiara rests,” the death knight said. In anger he slashed at the tree, and the withered trunk oozed black pus. Before the death knight could press the seneschal further, a low moan split the air.

The sound was sepulchral, like Soth’s voice, but it rattled with the noise of wind blowing dead leaves. Both Soth and Caradoc stared at the gnarled tree. The oozing gash the death knight had caused by his blow had opened into a mouth. Thick black liquid still dribbled from the hole, but now it passed over twisted wooden fangs before seeping onto the trunk.

The moan grew louder, ringing with power over the hillock and shadowed forest. Soth lashed out at the tree to silence it. The sword opened another gash, which became a second drooling, moaning mouth. Now two hollow voices sent their mournful cries of pain into the gloaming.

“Only in the Abyss,” Soth growled quietly as he stepped back from the tree. “Creatures such as this reside only in the Abyss.”

The death knight let the hand holding his sword drop straight at his side. With a slow, stiff gesture, he held his other hand out before him. The incantation he spoke was brief, its effect instantaneous.

A small dot of blue light appeared on the moaning tree, near its two wounded mouths. Thin tracers of azure radiance burst forth from the dot, then wound around the trunk and even into the fanged maws. A delicate lace of sizzling power soon covered the entire tree, thickening into a blanket of light. It filled the mouths, choking off their cries. The black ooze froze in ridges down the trunk to the tree’s knotted roots.

With the same inexorable strength that had crushed Caradoc’s neck, Soth closed his outstretched hand into a tight fist. The blanket of radiance tightened with it. A high-pitched whine sounded as the first cracks snaked around the trunk, then the tree shattered into a thousand shards of black wood. A low stump marked where the tree had been. Dark liquid pulsed and bubbled from the stump for a moment, then stopped.

An instant of silence followed the destruction of the tree, then a throaty howl echoed in the forest to the east. The long, low cry mimicked the shattered tree’s mournful call. To the west, where the sun had almost dropped behind the mountains, creatures hidden in the twilight forest howled their replies.

Caradoc had not moved since the eerie mouths had first cried out. Fragments from the tree lay scattered on the stony ground at his feet. Some chunks were covered with blue light; others, from deeper inside the trunk, were coated with obsidian ooze.

When howls sounded to the south and north, closer to the hillock, the ghost looked up suddenly. “Master, return us to Dargaard Keep,” the ghost said. “I have seen enough of this place.”

“What? Afraid of your tanar’ri ally’s minions?” Soth said. “You shouldn’t feel threatened here, in his abode.”

A puzzled look crossed the ghost’s face. Tanar’ri ally? Caradoc thought. Soth still believes my story about the tanar’ri lord! Then another realization hit Caradoc like a bolt of lightning: the death knight had not transported them somewhere through magic. Soth, too, had been taken against his will. Soth, too, was lost.

A growl rumbled from the drooping firs at the base of the hill. In the darkness there, a pair of blood-red eyes stared intently at the knight and the seneschal. The orbs were all Caradoc saw, but Soth saw more.

With his unblinking gaze, the death knight saw a monstrous, shaggy wolf crouched behind a thin cover of brambles. The gray-furred creature was twice the size of any wolf Soth had ever seen on Krynn. Its gaze met the death knight’s, then the wolf drew back its lips in a snarl. To Soth the gesture showed contempt, not fury, and seemed almost motivated by a greater-than-animal intelligence.

A second beast moved stealthily through the forest and joined the first behind the brambles. As soon as it arrived, it threw back its head and yowled. From a dozen places nearby, on all sides of the hill, similar calls erupted.

The death knight crouched into a loose fighting stance, his sword held before him. He knew that, though the creatures appeared to be large wolves, they might actually be more dangerous monsters in a lupine guise. After all, the gnarled tree had seemed mundane at first.

“Come on, then,” Soth challenged. A dozen or more pairs of glowing eyes now shone in the trees all around the hill. “If your master has ordered you to attack, curs, get it over with.”

The wolves remained at the bottom of the hill. Some crouched in one spot. Others paced back and forth, crossing the ground in steady, loping strides. Occasionally one of the great beasts would howl into the night, and the cry would be answered from the distance. And after each such call, another wolf would join the pack ringing the hillock.

Soth studied his adversaries. They showed no signs of immediate attack, so what were they up to? Brandishing his sword before him, the death knight took a few quick steps down the hill. The wolves close at hand rushed as one to block his path. They crowded before the death knight, yellow teeth bared in snarls. Soth took another step forward, and the beasts braced for his charge, but did not advance up the hill.

Letting his sword drop, Soth stood still and listened for sounds of other movement in the trees. “They are intelligent, after a fashion,” he noted aloud, not taking his eyes off the wolves. “They have orders to keep us here. Something else is in the woods, too. It’s coming this way.”

The death knight turned toward the shattered tree, expecting to see his seneschal hovering over the stump, as before. “Caradoc?” He scanned the hill and the tree line, but the ghost was nowhere to be seen.

A hiss of pine needles rubbing against something large and the snap of sticks under the tread of something heavy revealed movement in the trees. That can’t be Caradoc, Soth decided instantly, for his body has no substance here.

A strange creature broke out of the trees and lumbered up the hill. At first it appeared to be a man dressed in rags, protected by a few pieces of ill-kept armor. A rusty helmet hung low on its brow, almost over its eyes. Its chest was protected by an ancient and battered breastplate, but only one leg was covered by a greave. It shuffled barefoot through the thorny privets as if it wore the finest dragonleather boots.

The smell of rotting flesh reached the death knight before the feeble moonlight revealed anything else about the creature coming toward him. “Zombie,” he said to himself.

As the dead thing got closer, Soth saw that it had gray-green skin. The flesh looked to be smeared onto its body like soft clay and was covered with welts and sores. The stench grew stronger; Soth knew it would have choked a mortal. Yet the odor of corrupt skin and stagnant blood was nothing new to the fallen knight. Though his flesh had never really decayed, his loyal knights had slowly decomposed over the years, filling Dargaard Keep with the thick charnel smell of unburied corpses.

“Turn back,” Soth ordered, though his tone was more patronizing than commanding. “You have no quarrel with me. Go on your mindless way before I am forced to dismember you.”

The zombie didn’t pause in its halting march up the hill. Soth repeated his order. “Turn back now.”

The undead creature continued its advance. Soth was baffled. He had some modicum of control over all the lesser forms of undead on Krynn; zombies were unthinking masses of reanimated flesh, but on some instinctual level they had always recognized the death knight’s power. Until now.

Soth planted his feet, waiting for the shambling corpse to get close to him before he lashed out.

One step closer, then another. The moon revealed the zombie’s features to Soth. Beneath the rusty helmet, dark voids filled the creature’s eye sockets, and only the barest fragment of a nose clung to its face. Pasty skin, pocked from maggots feasting upon it, pulled tight over its cheekbones and chin. Lips and cheeks had been torn away to reveal a set of large, crooked teeth. Slowly, mechanically, the shambling undead took a few more steps. At last it thrust out its hands toward Soth. The bony fingers ended in sharp talons.

Soundlessly Soth’s blade cut through the air. The blow knocked the zombie off balance, and its left arm dropped to the hard earth with a thud. Grunting, the creature straightened and reached for the death knight with its remaining arm. Soth calmly swung his sword again. The zombie’s right arm followed its left. Yet the mindless creature pushed closer to the armored man. Jaws opened wide, it leaned forward to use the only weapon left to it-its sharp, yellowed teeth. With a curse, the death knight struck the creature in the face with his sword’s heavy pommel.

The zombie reeled backward, its skull caved in, the fragment of its nose gone. Before it could shamble any farther forward, Soth lashed out with his blade. The creature’s severed head rolled through the air and landed faceup in a thorny bush. Headless and armless, the zombie’s body stumbled drunkenly on the hill, then toppled into the dirt. A small gout of blood dribbled from its neck, staining the rusted breastplate crimson.

“Pay heed to this!” Soth shouted into the darkness, pointing at the corpse with his sword. “I’ve passed your test!”

As if in response to this boast, the wolves around the hilt released their voices into the night. The baying rang through the forest. More sounds of creatures crashing through the underbrush came just as the howling ceased. Six more zombies, clad in armor and rags like the first, shuffled up the hillock.

“Bah!” the death knight scoffed. “One or six or six hundred, I will slaughter these mindless things like sheep before a feast.”

When Soth took a step forward, however, he found his movement hampered. He looked down and, there, clinging to his armored right ankle, was one of the defeated zombie’s arms. Even without a body behind it, the limb was holding Soth fast, anchoring him in place. The zombie’s other limb was dragging itself across the ground, its fingers resembling nothing so much as a spider’s legs as it moved closer.

“What madness is this?” the death knight exclaimed.

He glanced at the severed head caught in the bush. Its mouth still chewed at the air, and the bush’s thorns dug long, deep scratches into its cheeks as it moved from side to side. The gruesome sight distracted the death knight’s gaze for just a moment. The other zombies had almost reached him by the time he looked up again. Soth did not raise his sword at first; instead he called to mind a spell and pointed.

A small flame burst from the tip of Soth’s finger, then sped toward the lead zombie. The flaming ball swelled quickly, leaving a dancing trail of fire and smoke in its wake. The half-dozen undead climbing the hill did nothing to avoid the missile, almost as if they dimly realized they were doomed.

The fireball struck. Hissing as it was engulfed in magical fire, the first creature fell to the ground, an unmoving, charred husk. The lethal attack took in the shuffling things around that one as well. Suddenly, the flaming corpse exploded, showering all the remaining zombies with fire. Three more of the monsters were soon burning, their bodies covering the hillside with dark, foul-smelling smoke.

Of the two remaining undead, one wore no armor whatsoever. This zombie was clad in a long robe, one like those worn by some priests or monks on Krynn. The death knight dispatched this one first. He raised his sword high and swung it down in a two-handed blow. With a sickening sound, the blade tore through the zombie’s shoulder, continuing through bone and desiccated flesh before exiting from the hip on the other side of the body. The robe-clad zombie managed one more step before its body split into two writhing halves.

The howl of wolves sounded over the hillock once more as the last zombie stopped, just out of sword’s reach from Soth. This one wore no helmet, but the rest of its body was covered in ancient armor. Emblazoned on the breastplate was a raven, its wings spread wide in flight. Wisps of long blond hair hung in places from the zombie’s rotting scalp, and much of its face was covered with skin, making it look far more human than any of its compatriots.

Soth, his feet still held by the two disembodied arms, presented his sword in a defensive stance. Yet the expected attack never came. The wolves cried out again, then the zombie turned and shuffled down the hill. Passing its burning kin, the creature repeated a single word over and over again. “Strahd,” came the strangled hiss. “Strahd.”

The zombie waded into the forest. The monstrous wolves also faded into the trees one by one until only a solitary beast remained. This wolf glared at the death knight, and the small fires on the hillside made its eyes sparkle malevolently in the night. Soth met that savage stare with his own unblinking gaze.

At last the wolf turned and retreated. As he hacked the clutching hands from his ankles, Soth could hear the wolves barking and yelping as they spread out in the forest, heading west. The death knight knew their noise was meant for him. “Follow,” they were saying.

The death knight tossed the writhing limbs and bodies onto a pyre. He bolstered the fire with chunks of the shattered tree, though the wood did not burn even half as well as the undead flesh. The blaze sent even more thick, pungent smoke into the night sky.

A few stars winked against the carpet of black, but their positions seemed random to Soth. Gone were the Dark Queen, the Valiant Warrior, all the constellations that defined the night sky of Krynn. Gone, too, were the black and red moons. Only a single gibbous orb, its light reflecting brightly, hung overhead.

“I am far from Krynn,” Soth said. After a pause, he added, “But I will not return there until I find Caradoc, until I know where he has hidden Kitiara’s soul.”

To the west, a wolf howled long and low.

The death knight sheathed his sword. “Your master lies at the end of your trail, and he might be of aid to me in finding my wayward servant,” he said. “I will follow and let you take me to this ‘Strahd.’ ”

• • •

Bony, age-spotted hands caressed the crystal ball like a lover. The milky white glass glowed slightly under their touch. The ancient artifact would reveal nothing to the casual observer. To the scarred fingers weaving intricate patterns upon it, however, the crystal ball had much to say.

“Urrr,” the ancient mystic groaned pensively. He closed his blind eyes and rubbed his fingers over the globe with more urgency. The light from the crystal grew more intense, casting ominous shadows over his wrinkled face.

The old man removed his hands from the glass suddenly, almost as if he’d been burned. With jerky movements, he reached for the parchment and the feathered quill pen that lay nearby. He turned his sightless eyes, as white as the crystal orb, to the paper and started to write.

The lines wandered across the page, some sentences crossing over others, some curling almost in a circle around the parchment’s edge. Yet the mystic’s hand never strayed from the yellowed paper, and, for those used to reading his scrawl, the message was quite legible.

When the old man finished writing, he swayed for a moment, then lowered his head to the rutted tabletop. “Let us see what you have learned,” came a silken voice from the other side of the room.

With a word of magic, a half-dozen candles burst into flame. A slender hand gloved in kidskin lifted the candelabra that held the wax sticks. Warmly their light flowed across the stone floor and onto the table where the mystic lay, exhausted. The possessor of the voice reached into the pool of light and gently lifted the parchment.

Two have arrived, the message began, one of great power, both of great use. The sins of ancient wrongs unforgiven bring them to your garden, though they know neither the Dark Powers nor the place to which they have been brought. Boarhound and boar, master and servant; do not hope to break their pattern. Honor it instead.

The graceful man placed the candelabra on the table, the parchment held absently before him. His eyes bore a vacant, distant look, and his lips were turned down in a slight frown. His dark clothes and his long black cape swallowed the light striking them, but the large red stone that dangled on a chain of gold from his neck reflected the candlelight sharply. Tracing his high cheekbone with a single finger, he stood elegantly, lost in thought. At last he reached down and stroked the old man’s snowy head.

“It is a shame your visions cannot provide you with more specific messages, Voldra,” Count Strahd Von Zarovich said, though he knew the mystic could not hear him. The old man was as deaf as he was blind. “At times like this I almost wish I hadn’t torn your tongue out. Ah, well, it cannot be helped. We could not have you revealing my secrets to the villagers if you escaped, could we?”

The count crumpled the parchment and tossed it into the empty fireplace. The paper burst into flames. “Boarhound and boar,” Strahd repeated as he opened a hidden panel in the stone wall. In the tiny alcove he placed the pen, ink, and crystal ball. “Intriguing.”

The mystic stirred and reached out for the crystal ball. “Urrr,” he groaned plaintively when he found the table empty before him.

The globe was Voldra’s only means of contact with the world. It provided the old man, who had been deaf and blind from birth, limited glimpses into life beyond his sheltered mind. The orb granted other gifts, as well. The mystic had never learned to write; in the farming village where he’d lived much of his life, there was little need for such skills. The crystal ball allowed him to join pen to paper and make meaningful, if somewhat vague, statements.

The wordless, strangled cries of his prisoner hardly touched Strahd’s consciousness as he crossed to the iron door and left the barren cell. His mind was coiling itself around the notion that the two strangers might prove useful to him. The count had known one of them was quite powerful even before Voldra’s scribbled message; no being with strength of will or spell entered the duchy without Strahd’s knowledge.

Strahd knew that the zombies he’d sent to test the newcomers’ strength had been destroyed. He knew, too, that the weaker of the two strangers had fled into the forest before the battle. The wolves were following that one, herding him toward the castle.

The other would prove more of a challenge. The thought excited Strahd; it had been a long time since a problem worthy of his serpentine intellect had presented itself. The thing to do now, he decided as he paced with stately grace down the lightless corridor, past the sobbing prisoners in their filthy cells, was to gather more information.