by James Lowder
“Forty-nine thousand and thirty-eight. Forty-nine thousand and thirty-nine.”
A lone being trudged across the wasteland, his shoulders hunched, his head cast down. Caradoc, for that was the poor soul’s name, did not need to lift his eyes to know that spread around him was an endless plain of dust. He had been walking for hours, perhaps days, through this netherworld that served as the threshold to the Abyss. Only three things broke the monotony of the place, and none of them were particularly welcome diversions.
Far from Caradoc, almost at the horizon, the river Styx crawled sullenly across Pazunia. Its banks were as treacherous as the rest of the land, for the river was by nature a thief, not a benefactor. Simply touching water drawn from the Styx robbed a man of all memory, and its swift currents had swept many a traveler in the netherworld to his doom.
“Forty-nine thousand and fifty-four.” Caradoc put his hand to his forehead. “No, wait. Forty-nine thousand and forty — four.”
Weird fortresses wrought of iron jutted from the dead earth in places, too. These were the forward outposts of the most powerful tanar’ri lords that dwelt in the six hundred and sixty-six layers of the Abyss, camps from which they could launch forays into the world of mortals. Horrifying guardians stood watch over these fortresses, protecting them from fiends serving rival tanar’ri lords. Still, attacks were frequent. Sounds from these bloody battles-metal ringing against metal, shrieks of the wounded fiends, and curses vile beyond belief-carried on the wind in Pazunia. Luckily for Caradoc, the fiends involved in the conflicts had little interest in a single traveler on the dusty plains, especially one who was already dead.
“Forty-nine thousand and sixty-eight,” he murmured kicking a small stone in his path.
Glancing down at his high black leather boots, Caradoc shook his head in disgust. The source of his unhappiness was neither Pazunia’s heat nor its stench, but the state of his clothing. His boots had kept their shine for the three and a half centuries he’d been dead. Now they were dull and covered with grit. The heels were worn to nothing from the long march. Caradoc felt his silk doublet plastered to his sweat-soaked back and shook his head again. No doubt it would be stained when he left the Abyss and went back to Krynn.
Before he counted his next step aloud, Caradoc straightened his tunic and brushed off his boots. Then he paused and squinted into the distance. “I should be close,” he said, if only to hear his own once-human voice.
The weary traveler expected to see a hole yawning ahead in the ground, but nothing out of the ordinary was evident. Gaping portals in the ground were a regular feature of the landscape, the third type of landmark that broke the monotony of Pazunia. Caradoc had passed dozens, perhaps hundreds of such holes on his trek. Some leaked thin mist onto the plain. Others spewed forth tortured, anguished screams. Those portals had been unwelcome because they did not lead to the level of the Abyss where Caradoc’s business awaited him.
“Forty-nine thousand and sixty-nine,” he sighed and started off again. He did not hurry. Neither did he cease his counting. Lord Soth, his master, had given clear instructions about that. Ten thousand steady paces should be named for each head of a chromatic dragon, Caradoc repeated to himself. Only then would he stand before the portal that snaked down to Takhisis’s domain.
At last he announced, “Fifty thousand paces.”
As he named the last of the steps he had been ordered to make across the plains, he stopped. No portal stood before him. Caradoc shielded his eyes against the sun and looked into the sky. Perhaps the portal lay above the ground, for such things were not unheard of in Pazunia.
Nothing.
Caradoc stood in utter consternation. The wind gusting around him sounded like mournful moans, and the dust hissed like a dying man’s last breath.
“Fifty thousand,” he repeated. “Where’s the damnable portal?” He grabbed the chain around his neck, pulling the medallion of his office from under his doublet. A twisted rose-once red, now dark with rust-shone on the badge. “I am seneschal to Soth of Dargaard Keep. I seek entrance to the domain of the Queen of Darkness.”
Without warning, the parched plain cracked open, swallowing Caradoc. For a time he was lost in darkness, falling through a lightless void, but that soon passed. With dreamlike slowness, he floated past level after level of the Abyss. The sensation of flying was not so strange to him. The sights, smells, and sounds assailing him most certainly were.
A place of ice followed the layer of absolute darkness. Frozen rain slashed across the air, borne on bone-chilling gales. Cracked floes of ice stretched to the horizon, broken now and then by huge pillars of snow-encrusted rock. The wind howled and curled around the monoliths, making them as smooth as the ice at their feet. The outcroppings stirred. A pair of cold blue eyes slowly opened on each pillar, and the malevolent gazes followed Caradoc as he passed to the next level.
On a plain of rusting steel two armies were arrayed. They met at a vast front where bodies and parts of bodies tore at one another. The air was filled by a low, sickening moan of despair, and the sharp smell of rusted metal overpowered even the stink of blood and decaying flesh on the battlefield.
A multitude of gaunt, squat creatures with rubbery bodies massed on one side of the field. Beings twice their size herded the squat creatures toward the fighting. These larger tanar’ri appeared as giant snakes from the waist down, but they had the faces, shoulders, and breasts of human women. There the similarity ended, though, for they brandished razor-bladed weapons with each of their six arms.
Across the field of metal massed an army of equal proportion. Caradoc shivered as he recognized these pathetic creatures as manes. Mortals who spread chaos and evil while they lived became such things in the afterlife. Their skin was pale white, bloated like corpses left in a fetid river, and tiny carrion-eaters crawled over them. Vacant white eyes staring ahead, the manes were herded toward their enemies by a monstrous general. This towering tanar’ri had deep, dark red skin and wings made of uneven, scabrous scales. Its yellowed fangs dripped venom as it shouted commands. In one hand the general waved a whip with twenty thorny tails, in the other a sword of lightning.
Caradoc knew that, had his evil deeds in life been more heinous than the murder of Lord Soth’s first wife, he might now be part of that army. For the first time in three hundred and fifty years, he was glad he was damned to spend eternity as a ghost on Krynn. He closed his eyes and moved on.
Through places of darkness and places of light he passed, domains of fire, of air, of water. Once Caradoc entered a hot, humid realm. At first it was too dark to see anything, then his eyes adjusted. The world was filled with dripping, slimy fungus. Mushrooms climbed a thousand feet into the murky air, trailing ropes of leprous white vegetation. Puddles of gray slime oozed along the spongy floor, and purple masses sent forth long, groping tendrils. The realm was silent, but the decay filled Caradoc’s nose and mouth. Worst of all was the sense that some magnificent but perpetually evil power was watching from the silence. Though Caradoc never saw a glimmer in the murk, he knew some great being had watched him pass.
At last the seneschal Ceased his descent. He stood upon the roof of a shattered temple, its columns broken, its walls blackened from fire. The temple had once been the home of the Kingpriest of Istar on Krynn; now, Takhisis, the Queen of Darkness, used this fragment of the building as a portal to Krynn itself. From the temple she worked to defeat all that was good in the world of mortals. The irony of that was not lost on Caradoc; the kingpriest had wanted desperately to destroy all evil. Now his temple was a base for the most malevolent of gods.
“Perhaps the kingpriest is somewhere nearby, too,” Caradoc mused as he studied his surroundings.
Around the temple a mass of lost souls thronged, pushing to get close to the building. “Dragonqueen!” the masses cried. “We are your faithful. Let us aid you!”
Caradoc knew Takhisis would not answer, not just then, anyway. As Lord Soth had told him before his journey to the Abyss
started, a mortal mage from Krynn was planning to challenge Takhisis in her own domain. Such a conflict was unprecedented; few mortals had power enough to contest a god in her home plane, especially one as mighty as Takhisis. Still, the conflict would divert the Dark Queen’s attention just long enough for Caradoc to locate the soul of a newly arrived woman named Kitiara Uth Matar.
He smiled in anticipation. Once he had recovered the soul and brought it to Dargaard Keep, Lord Soth would reward him. The death knight was a powerful servant of the evil gods, and he could petition Chemosh, Lord of the Undead, to revoke Caradoc’s curse. He could be alive once more. At least that was what Soth had promised.
A sudden thought awoke in Caradoc’s mind. What will I do if Soth refuses to honor the bargain? After a moment of contemplation, the smile returned to his face. There were ways to force the death knight into keeping his word.
The seneschal took his medal of office in his hands. “Reveal to me the shade of Highlord Kitiara,” Caradoc said.
Soft magical light radiated from the black rose on the medal’s front. The seneschal held the disk before him, and a sliver of radiance lanced out into the throng before the temple, revealing the woman he sought.
TWO
“Where is that fool?” Lord Soth growled impatiently. He clutched at the warped, worm-eaten arms of his throne. “The task was simple enough. Caradoc should have returned long before now.”
A transparent figure with long, flowing hair and gently pointed ears hovered before Soth. He has cheated you as you have cheated all who ever trusted you, the banshee keened.
The betrayer is betrayed! another unquiet spirit shrieked as she slithered through the air.
The banshee closest to Soth threw back her head and laughed. Her twelve sisters picked up the cackle. They whirled about the large entry hall that served as Soth’s throne room. Their howling echoed from the stone walls of the circular hall, up the twin stairs that climbed to the balcony, even up to the vaulted ceiling. Anyone within a mile of the keep could have heard the terrifying cacophony through the hall’s shattered doors, but few mortals ever ventured close to Dargaard Keep and the banshees’ wailing would drive even the fiercest creatures from the rocky cliffs.
A banshee moved closer to Soth, her fine-featured visage twisted with hatred. The gods penned the book of your punishment in the blood of two murdered wives and the tears of your own dead child.
The banshee was close enough that Soth could have reached out and struck her if he’d wished. Her face was fleetingly that of a beautiful elven woman. Though her eyes were pale, a slight hint of purest blue shone in them. The wild hair wreathing the creature’s head had been golden long ago. Even the banshee’s lithe movements belied a grace that was granted to elves alone. That flash of beauty passed quickly, though, and the elfmaid was once more a spirit without substance, a luminescent, perverted image of the lovely being she had been.
Your fate is written in that book, Soth of Dargaard, the banshee hissed. It is set down in those pages. You will know treachery!
The ranting of the unquiet spirit had little effect upon Lord Soth, for he no longer felt the sting of conscience or the unsettling fear of the future that plagued some men. The conflagration that had long ago blackened the walls of Dargaard Keep had taken his life. Those on Krynn who’d had the misfortune to cross paths with the lord of Dargaard called him a “death knight,” and the title carried more terror than that of ghost or ghoul or banshee.
“No such book exists-on Krynn or in the heavens. I have made my own destiny.” Soth dismissed the banshees with a wave of his hand. “I gladly take both credit and blame for all the evil I have done.”
And you have done great evil, the nearest banshee wailed. For you were first dark in the light’s hollow, expanding like a stain, a cancer.
Another added her inhuman voice. For you were the shark in the slowed waters beginning to move.
A third and a fourth sang their affronts over the words of the others. For you were the notched head of a snake, sensing forever warmth and form; the inexplicable death in the crib, the long house in betrayal.
The words circled back on themselves, weaving a deafening volume of infamy. At the point when the sounds became an unintelligible scream, a single banshee’s voice rose over the others. For you were once the bravest of the Knights of Solamnia, the most noble in the Order of the Rose. Your heroic deeds were told in song throughout Krynn, from the dwarven halls of Thorbardin to the elf-wrought spires of forest-cloaked Silvanost, from the sacred glades of Sancrist Isle to the temples of Istar’s kingpriest.
Soth scowled beneath the helmet he wore. “You do your task badly,” he said in a voice that sounded as if it came from deep within the earth. “Paladine made you banshees and sent you to haunt my castle. Every night for seven times fifty years, you have been the Father of Good’s accusing mouth, telling me of my failings.”
Suddenly the death knight stood. His ancient armor did not creak. His long cape swirled behind him, but did so in absolute silence. “Your vapid accusations bore me. Only memories cause me pain, and your prattle does nothing to return the most welcome past to life in my mind.”
One of the banshees screamed. The twelve other spirits took up the screech, adding their own weird voices to the chorus. You desire to remember your sins? You must be growing to enjoy the pain! the spirits wailed. We are undone even in this!
“I desire only diversion,” the death knight said at last. He gestured to something hidden in the shadows next to his throne. “After all, that is why I brought Kitiara here.”
With surprising gentleness, Soth pulled aside a shredded, bloodstained cloak. There, half hidden in the mist now drifting in patches across the floor, was the corpse of Kitiara Uth Matar.
Impatience washed over Soth again. “I will have you with me again soon,” he said to the corpse, his voice strained. He bent down and caressed a bloodless cheek. “You will be able to break the pall hanging over this ruined keep, dark heart.”
You will tire of her as you did your other wives, the banshees began. Her end will be-
“Enough!” Soth rumbled, and the banshees backed away. The death knight looked around the room, noting the weak sunlight that bled through the ruined doors, the lengthening shadows that crept across the scorched hall. Those things, along with the mist that was growing thicker with each passing moment, told Soth the day was near its end. “Caradoc has been gone for hours. He will rue this delay!”
Perhaps the battle between the Dark Queen and Raistlin ended before Caradoc could capture the soul, a banshee offered softly. Both Takhisis and Kitiara’s half-brother have reason to keep her in the Abyss.
Clasping his mailed hands together before him, Soth paced across the throne room. His footfalls made no sound on the stones. Neither did his boots stir the mist that curled in through the shattered doors and cloaked the blackened floor. The banshees withdrew into the shadowy corners of the hall as the death knight made his way to the stairs and began to climb. “I go to look for signs of the battle’s outcome,” he proclaimed without looking at the spirits. “Let no one disturb the highlord’s body.”
No windows allowed sunlight entrance to the keep’s hallways, but the death knight could see quite clearly in the darkness. He saw the ancient stone walls and the cracks climbing them like ivy. Even a small rat-thin from starvation and deaf from exposure to the banshees’ constant keening-that ventured meekly from a hole did not go unnoticed. The creature fled when Soth got close, driven away by the unnatural cold radiating from the undead knight.
Stiffly Soth marched down the pitch-dark corridors, thinking aloud about suitable punishments for his tardy seneschal. “Perhaps I should change his clothes to rags,” Soth said. “He was a fop in life, more concerned about brocades than blades, and death has not changed him a bit.”
A warped door on rusted hinges marked the end of the hallway. It groaned long and loud as Soth shoved it open. The room beyond was small but seemed the larger for the ga
ping hole where the wall had crumbled long ago. Playful breezes swept in from the breach, stirring up the dust and dirt that covered the floor. Because of the view it afforded, this place had been a guard post once. Dargaard Keep no longer had real need of sentries. The reputation of the castle’s lord was more effective at keeping people away than the strongest, dwarven-built walls. Nevertheless, a lone figure walked a post in the rubble-strewn room.
“Ah, Sir Mikel,” Soth said distractedly. “Stand aside.”
The armored figure ceased its pacing. Sir Mikel’s rusty armor was as ancient as Soth’s and hung loosely on his skeletal body. Scabrous yellow ribs shone through the gaps in the knight’s breastplate, and his worn boots hissed and thumped across the floor as he walked. An eyeless, fleshless skull stared out from a raised visor. As the skeletal warrior studied him, Soth wondered if some tiny part remained of the knight’s soul. Mikel, like all thirteen of the Solamnic Knights who had aided Soth in his crimes, had been damned to serve the death knight for eternity. The flesh had abandoned their skeletons long ago, and their individuality had fled them as well. Now, unless Soth gave them orders to follow, the knights ceaselessly walked the posts where they had died.
After a moment, Mikel seemed to recognize his master. He inclined his head and stood aside as the death knight crossed to the breach. Before Soth reached that vantage, he turned to Mikel. “Have you seen Caradoc this day?”
A painfully long pause followed the question, then Sir Mikel nodded haltingly. His bones rubbed together with the noise of stone grinding against stone.
“You saw him this morning, before he ventured into the Abyss on my errand?”