Knight of the Black Rose tols-1

by James Lowder

  Magda and Azrael hurried through the maze of boulders, toward the white stone pillar, but it was farther away than it had first appeared to be. By the time they reached the obelisk, the sun had disappeared, leaving Gundarak in the clutches of twilight.

  The pillar was huge, as tall as any tree Magda had ever come across in her travels with the Vistani. Perfectly smooth, its sides were covered with tiny runes. As far as Magda could see in the gloaming, they ran all the way up the column, but she could not understand any of the symbols. Around the column’s base lay a wide clearing, the ground hard but free of small stones.

  “Marble of some sort,” Azrael noted. He tossed his pack onto the ground and slumped against the pillar. His mail shirt insulated him from the faint shudder that slid up the marble, and the long day’s march had dulled his senses enough to make him deaf to the faint magical hum, a signal that vibrated for miles in all directions.

  Lord Soth and the twelve remaining skeletons entered the clearing. “At sunrise, we will head north from here, staying in the foothills of this mountain and the one to the west of it,” he said coldly. “The way straight through the mountains is too difficult for us.”

  Magda set her pack aside and began to scour the area for firewood. “Not much to start a fire with.” She sighed, scanning the area through the growing darkness.

  “No fire,” the death knight said. “It would alert everything within a day’s march.”

  “That spoils the atmosphere for my life story a bit,” the dwarf noted sarcastically, “but we wouldn’t want Gundar himself charging up here to interrupt me.”

  The others said nothing as the dwarf rubbed his hands together, then cracked his knuckles. It was as if he were about to arm wrestle someone in a tavern.

  “The place where I come from looks a lot like the land you see around you-boulders and rocks and not much else,” he began. “It’s that way over much of the surface, anyway. I’d only seen the surface a few times, but that’s more than most of my kind. No, the others spent all their time in the cities, hammering out weapons no one used and jewelry no one ever wore. Peace and humility were the rule in the city of Brigalaure, but they crafted the damned swords and rings anyway, just because it was important to make something…”

  Azrael’s tale was as bloody a story as any Magda had ever heard, though, like most such stories, it started innocently enough.

  His parents were crafters of modest income, and like all youths in the vast underground dwarven city of Brigalaure, Azrael was destined to learn one of their skills. He might have gained the lore of iron from his father, or the ability to cut rare stones into jewelry from his mother, but he was suited to neither type of work.

  The pounding, the heat, and the stench of sweat in the iron forges made him sullen. His arm wasn’t strong enough for the strenuous task of beating the metal into shape, and he lacked the stamina to tend the bellows or carry heavy burdens all day long. Still, his father possessed great patience; he decided to allow Azrael an apprenticeship of ten years to grow accustomed to the work.

  For a dwarf of Brigalaure, who could expect to live for five hundred years or more, a decade should have been a brief enough time to learn a craft, but Azrael grew bored in less than twelve months. He spent each workday daydreaming, his mind lost in imagined exploration of the land above the city. Legends told of monstrous lizards-ones larger than any of the great winches the dwarves used to move stone-that ravaged anything standing in their way. This was the reason the dwarves had first moved underground, thousands upon thousands of years before Azrael’s father had been born.

  His father let his daydreaming go on day after day, even over the objections of his forge-mates, until Azrael’s carelessness caused a fire. The youth was not bothered by the near-destruction of the smithy, and the plight of the apprentice who had been maimed in the blaze affected him even less. After all, the other young dwarf had taunted Azrael about his laziness.

  His parents took his silence about the unfortunate accident as contrition, but they knew he could not return to the forge. Instead, young Azrael found himself in his mother’s solitary workroom.

  To his surprise, he liked this place even less then the ironworks-not because he’d expected to enjoy cutting jewels, but because he hated his father’s work so vehemently. In the forges, he was one of three dozen apprentices. There no one seemed to notice if he disappeared for an hour or so. Just he and his mother occupied the small workshop, so she made certain his day was filled with tasks to help him learn the jewel cutter’s craft. Polishing the finished stones, collecting up the chips of ruby and diamond, even sharpening the cutting tools-all these tasks required concentration; somehow, his mother knew that his heart was not in the effort, even before he realized it himself.

  Azrael soon proved to be incompetent in his mother’s craft as well. His short, stubby fingers worked against him in a profession calling for a delicate touch, and he refused to abandon his daydreams, even when handling the most precious of stones. Finally disaster struck. Azrael dropped a rare and fragile gem, and it fractured like glass. His mother, fed up with his incompetence and stunned by the thought of paying to replace the shattered stone, banished him from her workshop.

  For the dwarves of Brigalaure, craft was status, and Azrael’s failure made him an outcast. Without a trade he could not be considered an adult. He could earn no money, no place in society, no respect. No one would take him in as an apprentice, not after gossip about the forge fire and the shattered gem. As he stood outside his mother’s workshop, her tirade still ringing in his ears, the young dwarf understood that he had failed definitively and that there was no place left to go. Brigalaure held nothing for him.

  He packed his few belongings late that day without any idea of where he was to go. When his father confronted Azrael, demanding that he pay for the jewel he’d broken, a red swell of anger engulfed the young dwarf’s soul. The moment his father turned his back, Azrael caved in his skull with a hammer.

  His mother was next, then his brothers and sisters. Azrael didn’t use the blood-spattered hammer on them, but his bare hands. While his fingers were too short for delicate craft work, they were blunt and strong enough for murder.

  Because his sister had managed a shriek before he killed her, Azrael found a politskara at his door. Such watchmen spent their time breaking up feeble quarrels over who could craft the most perfect arrowhead, so this one was totally unprepared for the bloody sight that greeted him. Azrael almost got away, too, but the politskara had enough sense to call up a mob. The gathered fletchers and stoneworkers were enough to bring an end to the murderer’s hope for escape.

  What happened next was unclear in Azrael’s mind. He was struck by an arrow fired from the crowd, and he had passed out as they closed in around him. He awoke in a dark tunnel, deep underground, banished, without food or light or any hope of finding his way back to Brigalaure. The citizens hadn’t had the nerve to kill him.

  A voice spoke to Azrael from the darkness, though it seemed to come from everywhere around him, even inside his head. It offered him life and power, but with the condition that he use that power to destroy the beautiful dwarven city. As the words of agreement left his mouth, sharp laughter filled the cavern and a terrible pain stabbed through Azrael’s gut. He tumbled facedown onto the cold stone as his bones twisted. His head pounding, he screamed, and the sound that came from his mouth was like the yowling of a wounded beast.

  He became a werecreature, part dwarf, part giant badger. With his newly heightened senses of smell and sight, he followed the trail left by his captors all the way back to the city. There he used the shadows to cloak his evil deeds. Over the next fifty years, he preyed upon those on the outskirts of Brigalaure, destroying homes and shops, killing those he found alone. Hundreds fell to his claws. The citizens of Brigalaure tried to hunt him down, but without success.

  “I’d found my craft,” Azrael noted proudly, leaning back against the white marble pillar. “And I was much better at
it than any of ’em were at stopping me.”

  Despite herself, Magda was caught up in the tale. She sat close to the dwarf, leaning toward him in the darkness. By the pale moonlight she could just make out his face as he spoke.

  “I was leading a hunting party through the labyrinth of tunnels I called home,” the dwarf said, a look of wonder crossing his features. “I was hoping to separate one particularly fat baker from the rest-I hadn’t eaten in a few days, you see. Anyway, I finally lured him away from the rest when, out of nowhere, this fog rises. One minute I’m wondering about the mist, the next I’m standing on the edge of a huge lake.”

  “In Barovia?” Soth asked. They were the first words the death knight had spoken since Azrael had begun his tale.

  The dwarf shook his head. “No, in a grim place called Forlorn, to the south of here. The place is creepy-no people, no animals, just this big castle. Needless to say, I stayed-well away from the castle.”

  The dwarf rummaged through his pack for a piece of bread but found nothing. He’d finished his share of the rations earlier that day. “Er, Magda, do you have anything I could eat? I seem to have supped the last of my supplies.” When she tossed him an apple, he frowned at it as if she’d handed him something inedible, then shrugged and took a bite.

  “That’s when I came to Gundarak,” he said. “I was only here for a couple of months. Not much good in preying upon villagers who have nothing worth stealing.” He took another bite from the apple. “Besides, the peasants themselves are all skin and bone, nothing to sink your teeth into.”

  Closing her eyes, Magda turned away. Soth, however, seemed intrigued by the dwarf’s tale. “Did you ever encounter the duke?” he asked.

  “I’ve seen Castle Hunadora, but I never went inside,” Azrael replied. “Lucky for me, I say. Just outside the place, I escaped from a dozen or so of his guards by jumping into the moat. They’d caught me sleeping in the woods and were bringing me in for ‘questioning.’ In most of the lands around here, that means torture.”

  At Soth’s prompting, the dwarf went on to describe Gundar’s castle, but his knowledge of the place consisted largely of details about the fetid moat that circled the estate. “I’m lucky I can hold my breath for a long time,” he concluded. “The water is thick with sewage from the castle and the refuse from the experiments Gundar’s son, Medraut, conducts in the dungeons.”

  A deep, liquid laughter filled the clearing. “You’re right, Fej,” they heard someone say, “it is a dwarf what set off the alarm. You can read them signals better’n anyone.”

  The sharp sound of steel striking flint echoed from the boulders, and two torches flared to life on opposite ends of the clearing. The skeletal warriors fanned out in a circle, but Magda had her cudgel at the ready before any of them could draw their swords. When the Vistani saw the two grotesque figures bathed by the light of the torches they carried, she couldn’t suppress a gasp.

  They were giants, standing twice Soth’s height, but their features were horrific, their bodies misshapen. One had an eye that was twice the size of its mate. The mismatched pair rested below a brow lined with deep wrinkles, over a bulbous nose and a mouth that hung open like a gaping wound. The giant’s teeth were missing from his lower jaw, and his gums had been scraped away from the bone by jagged upper teeth. One of the creature’s arms jutted from his side, not his shoulder. A torn shirt covered his bulk, but he dragged a length of thick chain that ended in a studded iron weight.

  The other giant was equally hideous. His features retained more humanity-apart from the piggish snout spread across his face-but large blisters dotted his skin from head to foot. These welts sprouted tufts of hair as red as any flame. He was hunchbacked but had managed to put together a motley collection of armor that protected much of his torso. He carried no weapon, but his hands were three times as large as they had any right to be. The giant flexed a fist as he stepped into the clearing.

  “Awright, you lot,” the first giant managed to say, his lower jaw moving little as he spoke, “you’re coming with us. If you put down the weapons, we won’t hurt you… much.” Both giants laughed at that pitiful jest.

  Magda’s head swam. How had the giants managed to sneak up on them? They hardly looked capable of stealth. And what alarm had Azrael set off? She glanced at the pillar. The dwarf had been resting against it for much of the evening. Suspicions of treachery filled her mind again, but she hadn’t long to dwell upon them.

  A battle had begun.

  An arm’s length from the Vistani, Lord Soth moved his hands in the complex patterns of an incantation. The air before the hunchbacked giant suddenly filled with snow, then an ice wall appeared, stretching between two boulders. Barred from moving forward, the giant bellowed in rage.

  Narrowing his overlarge eye at the death knight, the remaining giant advanced. He swung his crude flail, and the chain and steel weight swept across the ground, hissing like a scythe. Two skeletal warriors were caught by the blow. Their bones flew apart like shards of broken pottery.

  Frantically Magda looked from Soth to Azrael. The giant was too close to allow the death knight the time to cast another spell, so Soth drew his sword. The undead warriors did the same. Azrael, however, backed toward the wall of ice. At the sight of the retreating dwarf, the Vistani cursed; there seemed little question now that Azrael was indeed a traitor.

  Magda gripped her cudgel tightly and joined Soth against the flail-wielding giant. The thing had raised his weapon for another blow, but the death knight slashed him across the knee. As his leg buckled beneath him, he stumbled forward and the flail slipped from his hands. That didn’t prevent him from swatting another of the skeletal warriors with his torch. The blow lifted the skeleton from the ground. It struck a boulder with a resounding, sickening snap of bones, then crumpled to the earth.

  At the same time, a huge fist knocked a hole in the wall of ice. The second giant reached through the breach and grabbed Azrael. The dwarf, caught partway through his transformation into half-badger form, could do little but squirm and growl in the giant’s grasp. With a grunt from his piggish snout, the hunchback tossed Azrael over his shoulder as if he were nothing but a discarded toy.

  “Oi, Fej, give me a hand here,” the first giant cried. He was on his knees, holding off five skeletons with his huge torch. His arms were covered with bloody slashes from the undead warriors’ blades. His tunic hung about him in ribbons.

  “Awright, Bilgaar. Stop yer whinin’.” The hunchbacked giant had been busy climbing over the ice wall, and now he loped forward. At Soth’s command, the skeletons broke off from the first battle and formed a line between Fej and his fellow, their swords bristling before them.

  Bilgaar, the giant in front of Soth and Magda, braced a hand on his wounded knee and struggled to his feet. As he did so, the Vistani lashed out with her cudgel. Bilgaar tried to block the club with his torch, but all he received for the attempt was two broken fingers. “Aooww!” he howled. His torch spun from his hand and landed at the base of the pillar.

  Magda raised Gard to strike again, but the giant shoved her aside. The Vistani tumbled to the ground. The action cost the giant dearly, though. Soth, taking advantage of the opening, chopped at Bilgaar’s outstretched hand with a powerful two-handed swing. The death knight’s blade severed the giant’s hand from his wrist, and Bilgaar collapsed, clutching the bloody stump. Without hesitating, Soth drove his sword through the back of the giant’s skull. After Bilgaar whimpered once, his gaping mouth closed and the life fled from his oddly paired eyes.

  Fej was having a much easier time of it. A defeated skeleton lay unmoving at his feet, and the seven remaining ones were having a hard time scoring any hits through the giant’s armor. One of the undead moved too close to Fej, and he used his huge fist to crush the skeleton into the ground.

  The giant chuckled at the scattered bones, but that mirth was cut short by a bloodcurdling howl. Before Fej could spare a look behind him, Azrael leaped from a granite outcropping an
d landed on his hunched back. The werebeast had transformed fully into his half-badger form, and he looked none the worse from the giant’s earlier attack. With daggerlike claws and teeth, he tore into Fej’s throat.

  The giant dropped his torch and tried to grab the werecreature. He screamed once before Azrael severed his vocal cords. Then the skeletal warriors closed in.

  From the darkness between two boulders, Magda watched the skeletons and the werebadger tear the hunchbacked giant to bloody pieces. Soth, his back to her, studied the proceedings and cleaned his sword on a shred of Bilgaar’s tunic. Azrael had joined the fight, she noted acidly, but only because we were winning. There was no doubt in her mind now: The dwarf had used the pillar to summon the giants. Whether he did so for Strahd or Gundar didn’t matter; he was part of the trap.

  This might be my last chance to escape, she decided. They are all too caught up in the slaughter to notice. Quietly Magda got to her feet and edged into the darkness.

  “Six left,” Soth noted grimly, counting the remaining skeletons. “And we are still days from Castle Hunadora.”

  Azrael, his muzzle and paws caked with gore, finally stood back from the dead giant. He scanned the clearing. “She’s gone,” he rumbled. “The Vistani bitch has run off!”

  The death knight probed the night with his unblinking eyes. Azrael was correct. Magda had fled. “Can you find her?” he asked, something akin to disappointment in his voice.

  Grinning ferally, the werebadger dropped his hands to the ground and sniffed the air. “Don’t bother dispatching the skeletons,” he said. “She’s got a medallion that makes her invisible to ’em.” That said, he disappeared into the maze of boulders, sniffing the gravel.

  The moon had disappeared by the time Azrael returned, but he found Soth standing in exactly the same spot, in just the same position he had left him in earlier. The werecreature was in dwarf form again, and a large, swollen bruise covered the right side of his face. “She tricked me, mighty lord,” he said humbly. “I followed her scent into a blind alley, but it was only her clothes. She’d left ’em there to draw me in.” He bowed his head. “Before I could even turn around, she dropped off a boulder and hit me with that damned club. She knocked me out.”