Knight of the Black Rose tols-1

by James Lowder

  At that Soth drew his sword and lashed out at the keeper. The blade passed harmlessly through her, but the attack set the mastiff barking. The death knight sliced through the shadow woman again, and again the steel did her no harm.

  Azrael backed up a few paces and looked frantically for the gate from which they had entered the shadow realm. “Mighty lord, perhaps we should go back.”

  “Never!” Soth shouted. “What is your price, keeper?”

  The keeper bowed her head slightly. “You are a wise man. Even if you wished to, you could not leave before you paid my price. That is the rule of this place.” She took another step toward Soth. The mastiff licked its chops noisily. “The cost of passing through my domain is your soul.”

  Laughing, the death knight sheathed his sword. “I forfeited my soul long ago, keeper,” he said, then undid the straps holding his helmet in place and removed it. Patches of long blond hair hung from his scalp, dangling in places almost to his shoulders. His skin was parched, drawn tight against the bones beneath. Of his features, little could be seen; a shadow hid his nose and mouth. As he spoke, though, his white teeth flashed now and then from between his cracked lips. The darkness was greatest around his eyes, which were no longer human, but glowing orbs of orange light.

  The death knight donned his helmet again and refastened the straps. “To gain my soul, you would have to travel to the home of my world’s gods, to the domain of Chemosh, Lord of the Undead. Even then, you would likely find him unwilling to part with that prize.”

  After bowing her head, the keeper stood to one side of the narrow path. “You may pass,” she said, gesturing Soth forward with one hand. The death knight moved down the path. When Azrael tried to follow, however, the keeper once again blocked the way. The mastiff began to bark anew.

  “You are a strange creature, indeed,” the shadow woman said to the wounded werebadger, “but a heart still beats in your chest. You must pay your toll.”

  “Will it hurt? Losing my soul, I mean?”

  “I do not know. No one has ever paid the toll and lived to tell me about it,” she explained impatiently. As she reached toward the dwarf with a long-fingered hand, she added, “Now, cease your prattle. It has been many years since anyone has passed along the path, and my hound and I have need of sustenance.”

  The death knight was standing behind the keeper, but it was clear he was not going to lift a hand to help Azrael. He was on his own. As the shadow woman’s fingers drew closer to his chest, the werebadger stepped sideways, to the very edge of the lighted path.

  “There is nothing to either side of the path,” the keeper noted. She reached down and stroked the mastiff’s broad skull. “If you leave the light, you will be lost in the darkness until I bring you out.”

  Azrael cursed and sprang forward, directly at the woman and the mastiff. Like Soth’s blade, the werebadger’s assault did the keeper no harm, but his powerfully muscled legs drove him into the heart of the shadow creature.

  The next thing Azrael knew, he was engulfed in darkness, falling at an incredible speed toward some unseen doom. He screamed, but no sound came from his mouth. He flailed his arms and legs but could feel no movement other than the inexorable pull of gravity. In fact, he could no longer feel pain from his blasted shoulder. Perhaps, he realized with a shock, I’m dead.

  He felt the touch of long, slender fingers against his shoulder, and his descent slowed. Next, a burst of blue light cut into his right eye like a needle; his left was still blind from the lightning bolt. A scream-his own, he noted with odd detachment-filled his ears, and the pain from his wounds throbbed to life. When his vision returned, Azrael found himself sprawled on the path. The keeper stood over him, her mastiff at her side. The dog had its mouth open, and ropes of dark saliva dripped from its jaws.

  Azrael glanced down at his body. To his surprise, he had reverted back to his dwarven form. “W-What happened?” he gasped.

  “You got a taste of what lies to either side of the path,” the guardian said. “No more stalling, now. Give me your soul.”

  She thrust her fingers into the dwarf’s chest. They felt like daggers of ice to Azrael, but the more he struggled against them, the more the coldness spread inside him. “It must be here!” the keeper cried. She buried her arm up to the elbow in his chest. At her side, the mastiff howled its hunger.

  At last the shadow woman stood back. “I have never seen this,” she said sadly. “You are living, yet you have no soul.” The shadow mastiff slunk into the darkness to wait for another soul to fill its shriveled guts.

  Shivering and gasping from her icy touch, Azrael stared at the keeper. “Im-m-m-agine that,” he stuttered. He slapped his arms around his chest to bring the feeling back, then stopped. The keeper’s touch had been painfully cold, but the numbness it had left behind was preferable to his burns.

  Azrael staggered to his feet and looked up the path to the wrought iron gate. Soth was gone. “How long ago did he leave?” the dwarf wailed, rushing past the keeper. The death knight’s disregard for him did not surprise Azrael. In fact, he expected callous treatment from such powerful beings. But he had not endured the long journey to be abandoned without a fight; Soth was obviously destined for great things, and Azrael wanted to be part of them.

  She shrugged. “When you disappeared, he left without a word. Perhaps he thought you dead. You weren’t gone very long, though, so he still might be near the other side of the portal.”

  The dwarf ran to the gate, but before he pushed it open, he glanced back to the shadow woman. “Where does this lead?” he asked.

  The keeper stood on the verge of the darkness beyond the path, her slender form stooped in disappointment, her horned head dipped in sorrow. “I do not know.” she whispered. “No one has ever returned to tell me, and I cannot leave this realm to find out for myself.”

  Azrael shoved the gate wide. It creaked open on stiff hinges, and a rush of warm air blew past the dwarf. As swiftly as the darkness had engulfed him earlier, he found himself in a deserted alley, standing in front of a toppled rain barrel. He looked in wonder into the barrel’s mouth; he could see a faint image of the wrought iron gate in the water pooled inside. With the portal hidden this well, little wonder few people knew of its existence.

  The water also reflected Azrael’s features back at him, so that for the first time he saw the lightning bolt’s effects. The sideburn and mustache were gone from the left side of his face, his left eye was closed tightly, and his shoulder was still hunched and twisted. His arm felt a little stronger, but the burns on his chest, side, and face hurt terribly. The loss of his hair bothered him more than the pain. By tomorrow, he would feel a lot better; his preternatural healing abilities were common to lycanthropes, from what he’d heard. For some reason, though, his hair took a long time to grow back.

  When Azrael looked down at the sorry state of his brocatelle tunic-in tatters from the lightning bolt and stained with Medraut’s blood-he wished his clothing would mend itself as quickly as his body. He would simply have to steal something as soon as he found Lord Soth.

  The narrow alley in which the dwarf found himself ran between two buildings, a bakery and a butcher shop. The aromas of freshly baked bread and recently slaughtered animals made the werebadger’s stomach growl. He pushed thoughts of food aside-as best he could, at least-and studied his surroundings.

  The walls framing the alley tilted together as they rose higher, and the windows on the third stories practically opened onto one another. Above that, the buildings’ roofs met, allowing only a trickle of sunlight through. In one direction, the alley led to a dead end. In the other, it opened onto a busy marketplace. Below each window, puddles dotted the unpaved ground, stinking with garbage and the contents of chamber pots. It was, in short, like the alleys in most sizable towns-dark and dirty.

  “Gods of light preserve us!” someone shouted from the marketplace.

  A woman’s scream rang out, long and shrill, followed by exclamations of fr
ight. They’ve spotted me, Azrael decided, but when he looked toward the marketplace, he saw the commotion was caused by something else.

  He hurried to the alley’s mouth and scanned the frightened mob. Two hundred people crowded the square, though many of them rushed toward the wide thoroughfares leading away from the marketplace. Others pushed into the shops bordering the square. Tents collapsed as men and women jostled their supports. Carts were overturned, and baskets of food were spilled, their contents flowing across the dusty cobblestone square. Fletchers and bakers and peddlers of all sorts of goods fled from the figure in ancient, blackened armor who stood in the market’s center.

  A wide grin crossed Azrael’s face. The keeper of the portal had been correct: Lord Soth hadn’t gone far.

  The death knight lashed out at people indiscriminately. His sword carved a bloody furrow in one man’s back, then he caved in another’s skull with his mailed fist. A dozen or more corpses lay at his feet.

  “Is this how he treats the people of Krynn?” the dwarf whispered. He looked at the crowd, but the reason for the death knight’s fury did not present itself immediately. No one seemed to be challenging Soth, though one of the corpses did wear the garish uniform of a guardsman.

  The sight of that uniform made Azrael’s heart skip a beat. The blue jacket with gold buttons and epaulets; the black pants and high leather boots; the short, flat-topped hat with the black raven spreading its wings across its front-this soldier’s garb was familiar to him. It belonged to the watch in the town of Vallaki. And if they were in Vallaki…

  The dwarf shuddered. The reason for Soth’s ravings crystallized in his mind.

  The portal had returned them to the duchy of Barovia.

  The Old Svalich Road remained strangely clear for the two days it took Soth and Azrael to march east from Vallaki to Castle Ravenloft. They both knew Strahd would hear about the slaughter the death knight had perpetrated in the quiet fishing town. Yet no one challenged their progress, even though the switchbacks and blind turns that allowed the road to climb the foothills of Mount Ghakis made it a perfect location for an ambush.

  Of course, the wolves followed their every move from a distance, disappearing into the forest if Azrael tried to catch up with them. The death knight cared little about the beasts, though he knew they were conveying information back to the count. The dwarf found them a challenge, and he sometimes passed an hour stalking the wolves. While he was skilled as a hunter, they were beyond his abilities.

  “Strahd will be expecting us, of course,” Azrael said as he trudged along the road. “Do you have a surprise for him, mighty lord? I mean, if you don’t mind me asking, of course.” When Soth didn’t reply, he shrugged and scanned the bushes for any sign of the wolves. The death knight had grown ominously silent since their return to Barovia. It was all Azrael could do to get him to speak four times in a day.

  “I’m sure you do have a surprise for him,” the dwarf said, more to himself than to his companion. He sighed, then scratched furiously at the peeling skin on his neck. A few thin ribbons came off under his fingernails, revealing new pink skin.

  Few signs of the damage wrought by the lightning bolt remained on Azrael’s body or face. The charred skin had been shed, and his shoulder had righted itself. His left eyelid drooped a little, but his sight seemed to have returned completely. The same was true of his sense of smell. Only his lip and jaw, as smooth and hairless as his pate, stood as reminders of the attack.

  Azrael had stripped one of Soth’s victims in the marketplace, replacing his bloodstained tunic and breeches with a new shirt and pants. Both were too large, but he used a razor he found in a man’s pack to cut them to size. He’d also grabbed a mace from the fallen watchman, knowing as he did that the count would likely send skeletons or zombies after them. Such blunt weapons were effective for smashing their reanimated bones to dust. Now, with each short-legged step Azrael took, the mace tapped his thigh reassuringly.

  They spotted the castle and the village of Barovia just before sundown, a fact Azrael took as a bad omen. “Uh, shouldn’t we wait here until the sun rises again and Strahd is forced back to his coffin?” the dwarf asked tentatively.

  “No,” the death knight replied. “We will have to fight our way to the keep whether the sun or the moon shines down upon us. The sooner we begin this war, the sooner I will have Strahd’s head adorning the gate of Castle Ravenloft.”

  The ring of poisonous fog that Strahd could raise around the village was nowhere to be seen, and the town itself appeared deserted from Soth’s vantage; nothing moved in the streets, and the shops and marketplace were closed, even though there was still enough daylight to conduct business. That did not mean the count had failed to prepare a defense for his home, however.

  A small army crowded before the rickety bridge, which Soth knew was the only way into the keep. “He has pressed the villagers into defending his home,” Soth noted as he and Azrael started down the road.

  “Human soldiers?” the dwarf scoffed. “This won’t be much of a challenge.”

  But when the death knight and the werebadger reached the clearing, they saw that zombies made up the bulk of the army of two hundred, with a few skeletons and battle-scarred and fearless mortal mercenaries filling out the ranks. Gargoyles flapped over the crowd, goading the soldiers into position with whips of barbed steel. One of these officers left the ranks as Soth approached.

  “My master sends his greetings, Lord Soth,” it shouted as it flew toward the death knight. The gargoyle’s slate-gray wings took on a red tint in the light of the setting sun. Its face was long, with a chin that jutted out like a sharpened dagger. Its body was so rounded that it appeared almost soft. Soth knew better; such creatures always had skin as hard as stone.

  Landing gently before Soth, the gargoyle kneeled and bowed his head. “My master has heard of your return to the duchy, noble lord, but he knows not the reason for your anger.”

  The death knight faced the messenger. “I have nothing to say to you, lackey. My words are for Strahd alone.”

  Standing, the gargoyle nodded. “Know this, then, Lord Soth. My master has sealed the keep with his sorcery. You cannot enter by walking through the shadows.” He gestured at the assembled army. “You can gain entrance only by passing across the bridge, and we are charged to prevent this.”

  “Then the doom of these troops is sealed,” Soth replied.

  After bowing again, the gargoyle flapped back over the army. He crossed over the bridge and entered the keep’s courtyard to inform the count of the death knight’s words. The commanders shouted final orders, and the army shuffled forward.

  Azrael cupped the mace in his hand. He wished he’d remembered to take the mail shirt from Gundar’s castle, but he brushed that thought aside. Weapons of steel or iron could do him tittle harm; he regenerated too quickly from the wounds they caused for them to present any serious threat. Only weapons created by magic or blades wrought from silver were a real danger, and it didn’t look like the zombies and skeletons carried such precious arms.

  “One-hundred-to-one,” the dwarf said, grinning up at the death knight. “Just enough to make it interesting.”

  Soth turned. “I won out over greater odds when I was a mortal knight on Krynn,” he replied. “And I did not possess the powers I have now.”

  The army had closed to a dozen yards. The zombies were unarmed, though Soth remembered how difficult they had been to defeat when he faced them on his first night in Barovia. The skeletons and the few humans wielded a variety of weapons-swords, axes, even flails and pole arms. Yet he did not draw his own blade, not yet at least.

  With a quick movement of his hand and a softly spoken command, Soth called a swarm of flaming stones into existence. The meteors were the size of the death knight’s fist, and when they hit the front rank, they burned holes through whatever they struck-flesh, armor, or bone.

  A skeleton, its skull shattered, dropped to one knee. The zombies behind it trampled it beneat
h their stumbling advance. Rag-clad dead men caught fire, and their attempts to put out the magical flames simply spread the fire to their hands and arms. They fell, too, though their fellows dodged the flaming corpses. In all of this, the undead soldiers made no sound. The battle was far from silent, though. The human sell-swords screamed as they died and the gargoyles continued to shout their commands.

  Soldiers shambled forward to replace the thirty destroyed by the sorcerous attack, and the death knight drew his sword, its blade dark in the growing twilight.

  The first soldier to get within striking distance fell to Azrael’s mace. The dwarf howled his victory as the skeleton dropped to the ground, its spine crushed, its rib cage split apart. It was soon joined by a human; Soth had almost severed his head from his neck. But the cry of victory died on Azrael’s lips when he saw a glint of silver. A mercenary, scars zigzagging his cheeks, stepped toward the dwarf. In one hand he held a silver long sword, in the other a dagger glowing with a faint aura of magic.

  “After he prayed to Paladine, Soth received a quest,” Caradoc reported. “He was to go to the city of Istar and stop the kingpriest from demanding the power to eradicate all evil on Krynn.”

  Strahd Von Zarovich steepled his fingers. “Go on,” he purred. This was the third time the ghost had repeated the tale of Soth’s curse for the vampire lord, and he had finally discovered a useful theme in the story.

  “That very night, the knights who were besieging Dargaard Keep fell under some sort of spell, a magical sleep that allowed Soth to sneak past them undetected,” Caradoc continued. “He rode for days toward Istar, but the thirteen elven women who had revealed his dalliance with Isolde to the Knights’ Council stopped him on the road. They intimated Isolde had been unfaithful to him, that the son she was carrying was not his child at all, but the bastard of one of his ‘loyal’ retainers.”

  The vampire smiled. “And Lord Soth turned away from his sacred quest to confront his wife.” He stood and paced the study, his agitation playing across his features. “He was a man of strong passions, eh, Caradoc?”