by James Lowder
Her resolve strengthened, Magda tied her long red dress into a knot at her waist. She was surprised to find her hands shook only a little. Perhaps I am braver than I thought, she decided. After all, I survived the journey to the castle in the company of an undead knight. Why shouldn’t I be able to escape back to the forest? Taking the torch, she went to the door and opened it cautiously.
The light sent a few rats scurrying for their hiding places. From fissures in the stone walls, the bloated vermin watched the Vistani creep from the bedroom. On the ceiling, centipedes the length of Magda’s arm pulsed forward on hundreds of thin, clutching legs. The woman flinched at the sight but pressed on. Such mundane creatures were certain to be the least frightening thing she would encounter.
A single cobweb-covered stair led from the hall. There were no windows, no doors. Magda quietly crept toward that narrow staircase, holding the torch before her in much the same way a cleric presented a holy symbol to a creature of darkness. Before she mounted the first step, she heard something shuffling down the stairs toward her.
Without hesitating an instant, Magda headed for the bedroom. She reached for the brass doorknob, but it resisted her attempts to turn it. The sound of the creature’s heavy footfalls grew louder in the hallway as it neared the bottom of the stairs. A scream of panic welling in her throat, Magda tried the door again, but again it would not open. Somehow, the door had locked behind her. She held the torch to the right and left, but the walls appeared solid save for the few cracks inhabited by vermin and insects. She was trapped.
“Somethin’s out o’ place,” came a voice from the darkened stairway. The words were hissed in a voice that sounded like metal grinding against stone. “Somethin’ that needs light t’see.”
Magda threw her back against the solid wooden door in an attempt to break it open. The footfalls stopped, and two glowing blue eyes appeared in the darkness at the foot of the stairs. “It’s a she somethin’,” the creature said gleefully.
With a shaking hand, the Vistani held the torch at arm’s length. The creature chuckled crassly from the shadows. “Want t’see me, do you?” it asked and stepped into the circle of light.
The creature was manlike and stood about four feet tall. Rough, obsidian skin covered its thin frame, from the tip of the single twisted horn that jutted from its forehead to the end of the long, spiny tail that ran from its lower back. Its eyes were wide and staring, its nose little more than two holes, its mouth a wide, drooling chasm. With a flutter of movement, the creature folded small, leathery wings tight against its shoulders, then crouched and let its three-fingered hands scrape against the floor. As the guardian studied Magda with its blue eyes, it ran a gray, forked tongue over its pointed teeth.
“Master’ll be wantin’ you, I think,” it said. The creature spoke slowly, as if moving its jaw caused great pain. With a start, Magda realized she had seen this creature, or ones similar to it, all around the castle. It was a gargoyle, animated by sorcery, that stood before her.
The obsidian creature leaned forward and thrust a hand at Magda’s leg. With a small shriek of surprise, the woman leaped back and swung at the gargoyle with the torch. A resounding crack echoed through the hall. The flaming club rebounded off the stone-skinned arm, jarring Magda’s shoulders. The light from the cracked torch dimmed a little; the torch was magical, but obviously not indestructible.
“Want t’play, do you?” the gargoyle hissed. It crawled out of the light’s reach, rubbing its arm where the magic flame had singed it. Its blue eyes shone malevolently in the darkness.
Keeping the torch between her and the creature, Magda edged toward the stairway. She attempted a prayer to the spirits of her ancestors, but a lump in her throat held the words back. Only a strangled gasp escaped her lips.
One step, then another. The Vistani watched the gargoyle’s ice-blue eyes as it retreated from the torchlight. A hope flared in her heart; the creature was leaving! That hope was crushed almost the instant it sprang to life. Without warning, the gargoyle rushed into the torchlight. Its face held a horrifying expression-eyes bulging, fangs bared, and mouth gaping wide. A terrible, grating scream split the air as the creature lurched past the Vistani.
With speed Magda had no hope of countering, the gargoyle raked one taloned hand across the woman’s shoulder. Three thin lines of crimson appeared almost instantly, marking the path of the claws. The shoulder began to throb, but the pain was nothing compared to the sickening smell of offal and decayed flesh coming from the creature’s hot breath. Gagging, Magda brought one hand to her mouth and fell back against the wall.
Taunting laughter sounded in the hallway, as the creature circled Magda with deceptively heavy footfalls. The Vistani, disoriented from the pain in her shoulder, stumbled along the wall. Her hand brushed across a centipede, and the creature curled around her arm before dropping to the floor and pulsing into the darkness. Magda barely noticed.
“Don’t want t’play no more?” the gargoyle hissed facetiously.
Magda had her gaze fixed on the creature’s bright blue eyes, so she almost ran into the end of the hallway. Somehow she’d gotten turned around and, instead of the stairway, she’d reached a dead end of stone and mortar. Her shoulders slumped in defeat, and the torch nearly dropped from her hand.
Seeing its opponent drop her defenses, the gargoyle burst into the light. Magda reacted swiftly, though, and thrust the torch into the creature’s ice-blue eyes as if it were a long-bladed dagger. A look of horror flashed across the monster’s face as the magic flame licked at its eyes and insinuated itself into its nose and gaping mouth. A stench of burned flesh and corrupted earth erupted in the hallway.
“What, no more playing?” the Vistani shouted as the gargoyle careened off the wall next to her, its talons tearing at its scorched, bubbling eyes. Magda found herself laughing uncontrollably at the howls of torment that erupted from the darkness as the creature ran away. When she realized what she was doing, the laughter stopped and tears began to stream down her face.
“I will not let them do this to me,” she whispered. “I will not go mad. I will not be like them.”
Magda pushed herself off the wall as a low, grinding sound caught her ear. She held the torch low, close to the noise. There, where the stone met the floor, was a short space scraped free of dirt and dust. The wall had moved! Carefully placing the torch at her feet, Magda pushed with all her might. The sound of stone grinding against stone grew louder as a section of wall slid backward.
After retrieving the torch, the Vistani ducked through the low portal into the short corridor that lay beyond. Two sets of double doors lined this hallway, and weak daylight seeped under the doors to Magda’s right. Relief and hope made her heart beat faster. With renewed vigor, she clutched the torch and started for the doors.
“Tryin’ t’get away,” a voice slurred.
Magda turned to see the gargoyle crawling from the secret door. The gray tongue lolling from its mouth was blistered. The obsidian skin around its nose had cracked open, and gray liquid oozed from the wounds. Its eyes had sustained the most damage. One socket gaped empty, though the deep scratches seemed to indicate that the gargoyle itself had clawed the organ out. The other eye was no longer blue, but rather clouded and milky white. The gargoyle could plainly see well enough, though, for that one remaining eye was trained squarely on the Vistani.
Magda ran and pushed through the ornate double doors. The room beyond was huge. Sunlight filtered into the hall through cracked and broken windows, their iron frames hanging askew. There was no furniture there save for a huge throne sitting atop a raised platform. Magda looked desperately from right to left. Two sets of stairs, separated by a narrow wall, ran down from the throne room.
The sound of the gargoyle shuffling down the hallway had just reached the Vistani’s ears when she bolted toward the stairs. Her bare feet kicking up little swirls of dust, Magda raced across the grimy floor. It shouldn’t be hard to outrun the gargoyle, she told herself
as she stumbled down the first steps. She had injured it enough to slow it down.
But the creature’s grating, shrieking voice called out from the throne room, much nearer than Magda had figured it would be. “Worse awaits you down there,” it shouted. Magda dared a glance over her shoulder and saw the gargoyle floating across the room on its batlike wings.
Luckily the ceiling was too low and the walls too narrow for the creature’s wings to be effective on the stairs. Magda leaped down the stone steps three and four at a time, through sheets of cobweb and over the omnipresent rats. After a small landing, the twin sets of stairs joined together and widened into a broad, gentle curve of stone, then emptied into a domed room.
The Vistani recognized the place as the room where she and Soth had first met the count. Torches still lined the walls in iron sconces. Cobwebs hung from the ceiling in gray sheets, obscuring the ancient, peeling frescos high above. Only the leering gargoyles were missing. Their stations around the dome’s rim lay empty.
Magda wondered if she should try to recover her dagger and her belongings from the dining hall but abandoned the idea almost as soon as she had thought of it. The gargoyle clomping down the stairs sounded dangerously close. She turned toward the open double doors that led to the entryway and the outside. As she took a step toward that portal, however, something red and scaly moved from the entryway’s shadows and blocked the woman’s path.
“None may leave without the master’s permission,” a small red dragon warned from the doorway, its voice sibilant.
The Vistani had never seen anything like the wyrm. It matched her height with the length of its body, and smoke rose menacingly from its nostrils as it spoke. Wings lay folded against its back. They flexed from time to time as the guardian tensed its muscles. Catlike it crouched, studying her with bright, slitted eyes. With mesmerizing slowness, the dragon’s head moved back and forth on its long, ridged neck. Magda had seen a snake charmer in a marketplace once, and the hooded serpent dancing to that old man’s flute had moved in a similar fashion. The effect was the same, too. The Vistani found herself as captivated by the wyrm as she had been by the serpent in the market.
“Worse t’await you,” came a voice from behind the Vistani, followed by a gleeful chuckle. Magda didn’t have to look to know the gargoyle had reached the bottom of the stairs. The torch dropped from her suddenly numb fingers. The cracked wood split when it hit the floor, and the torch broke apart into a dozen useless, burning fragments.
The huge spider chittered as it hopped sideways across the floor. Tufts of stiff black hair covered its body and spindly legs, and its fanged mouth moved reflexively, dribbling poison in sticky threads. It reared back on four of its eight limbs and lurched forward.
Lord Soth paid the creature little mind; the three other monstrous arachnids that had attacked him lay squashed like so many mundane fleas. The sole remaining spider had challenged him repeatedly but had not moved close enough to be a threat. All the death knight needed to do was draw his sword, and the spider would scuttle back to the corner where its web had been destroyed and now carpeted the floor as ashes.
Soth returned his full attention to the thing strapped to the torture device before him. The wererat was dead, a silver dagger in his heart, another planted firmly in his skull. As the death knight watched, the hairy, elongated snout melted to human features and the pointed ears shrank and rounded. The hunch disappeared from Pargat’s back, and the corpse rested flat on the silver bands once again. The ambassador had transformed into a ghastly man-rat just before Soth drove the silver daggers into his vital organs; in death, he returned to his mutilated human form.
“Go to whatever hell awaits you,” Soth rumbled as he stepped away from the terrifying bronze and silver device.
The death knight had tried to force the ambassador to reveal the location of the portal in Duke Gundar’s castle, but to no avail. Soth was convinced Pargat had told the truth in the end-he could not talk of the portal because of an enchantment Gundar’s son had placed upon him. To negate such a spell lay far beyond Soth’s skill with magic, so out of irritation he had killed the unfortunate ambassador.
The giant spider edged closer, but Soth turned his back on it and crossed the room. The arachnid waited for the death knight to reach the door, then it hopped forward and loomed over the dead man trapped in the torture device. “Enjoy your dinner,” Soth said as he disappeared into the darkened hallway.
A group of rats that had gathered in the hallway housing the vampire’s larder scattered when Soth passed by. The death knight crushed the vermin-spies whenever they got underfoot, and word had obviously already passed along their network to avoid the newcomer. The rats found easy escape routes from the larder hall, for the doors to all ten cells had been shattered. Upon leaving Voldra’s room, Soth had methodically smashed each door and slit the throats of the unlucky peasants who were being held captive. One man struggled against the blade; the others went to their deaths almost willingly.
Soth watched the rats flee. “The corpses and spilled blood are my gifts to you, in return for your cooperation,” he called after the last whiplike tail to slither into a room. “Keep careful track of all that I do this day and report it to your master when he awakens.”
The stairs were empty and silent as the death knight made his way to the main floor. As he walked, he considered what further damage he could wreak upon the count’s home; Strahd could not be allowed to forget what a mistake he’d made in ordering about Lord Soth of Dargaard Keep as if he were a common servant. And when he’d caused enough havoc, Soth would head for Gundar’s castle. He needed no torture-borne confidences to find the gateway back to Krynn.
“None may leave without the master’s permission.”
The words came from the room beyond the stairs, and Soth paused, waiting for the sibilant voice to speak again. Instead, a different voice-this one high and grating-announced something the death knight could not interpret. Base laughter filled the room and staircase, then something wooden struck the floor.
“Ah, more of Strahd’s minions to destroy,” the death knight said and walked from the staircase.
A crumbling archway partially obscured the chamber, but Soth saw that Magda stood at the center of the domed room, the flaring fragments of a torch at her feet, a gargoyle crouching to her left. This hideous creature, with its scarred face and razor-sharp talons, laughed again. The braying reminded Soth of the drunken brigands he had often dispatched in his days as a Knight of the Rose.
“Lord Soth!” The Vistani locked her green eyes on the death knight. When she spoke again, the words came haltingly, choked off by fear and uncertainty. “H-Help me.”
Like some stone-skinned ape, the gargoyle loped toward Magda. Its hands scraped noisily over the stone floor. “Help me,” it mocked. “Ha! Nothin’ t’help you now!” It circled the Vistani, eyeing the remains of the torch.
Magda kicked the embers at the gargoyle, and the creature scurried back a few paces. Soth saw her glance to her left, then she said, “Strahd has plans for you, Lord Soth. I know what those plans are.”
“Silence!” something hissed from the doorway, hidden from Soth by the archway.
The death knight stepped into the room, his cloak billowing behind him. What he saw in the doorway astonished him.
A dragon! It was only a small red, but the death knight well knew that any wyrm could prove a deadly opponent. He studied it closely, taking in its stance and its strength. The dragon had raised itself out of its crouch, standing stiff-legged in defiance of the newcomer. Claws as white as sun-bleached bones scraped against the stone as it pushed forward a step. Tail twitching in irritation, the wyrm probed the air with its forked tongue. That’s a good sign, Soth noted. It is uncertain how powerful a foe I may prove to be.
The death knight had dealt with red dragons on Krynn; at one time, the evil fire-breathers had been a keystone in Takhisis’s evil army. With age, such dragons gained the ability to study spells like any
mage. Soth hoped the young red hadn’t lived long enough to acquire such enchantments.
“Greetings, Soth of Dargaard,” the dragon said. Though its tone was pleasant, smoke puffed in noxious clouds from the dragon’s nostrils as it spoke.
The death knight replied coldly, “I am at a disadvantage. Strahd told you who I am, but he failed to mention your name to me.”
“Names have power, Soth. Pardon me if I do not offer you mine.” The twitch in the dragon’s tail grew more insistent, and the beast slithered a step toward the Vistani. “Perhaps if you lower the blade you brandish…”
Soth turned to Magda. “Quickly, girl! To my side!”
The Vistani took only a single step forward before a black, three-taloned hand wrapped around her ankle. She hit the floor hard, face-first, and her breath exploded from her lungs. Through tearing eyes, she saw the gargoyle gripping her leg with one hand. The creature ran its blistered tongue over its lips.
At the same time, the dragon shot forward, cutting the woman off from her would-be savior. The wyrm lowered its head and brandished its set of short horns. When Soth stepped toward the woman, it spread its red, leathery wings. “Do not interfere with us, Soth,” the dragon hissed.
The show of strength did not impress Lord Soth. With an overhand swing, he slashed his reply to the dragon’s warning. His ancient sword bounced harmlessly off the wyrm’s crimson scales, though the creature screeched in anger at the fallen knight’s impertinence. Still growling, the dragon sprang at Soth, its mouth open wide.
Needle-sharp teeth clamped down on the death knight’s wrist. Pain shot up Soth’s arm as the teeth tore a jagged-edged hole in his armor and bit into his flesh. Had Soth been mortal, the attack would have torn his arm off below the elbow.
The blow also knocked the sword from Soth’s grasp. The ancient weapon bounced pommel-first off the floor, then slid with a high-pitched whine of metal on stone out of the knight’s reach. Soth paid little attention to the lost weapon as he balled his free hand into a fist and battered the dragon’s snout.